The Philosophy of Mystery

Ev. Although I take the metaphysics of a divine with reservation, his facts may not be doubted. For there are other powerful impressions that will produce phenomena as curious. The arm of a young man in the “Ospidale della Vitta,” at Bologna, in 1832, was grasped by a convulsive patient. Violent spasms succeeded, and he lost the senses of taste, smell, and sensibility of the skin, but he could hear if the voice was applied on the stomach; and could, at that spot, discriminate between different substances.

Another patient in the same hospital was subject every third day to violent convulsions, during the continuance of which, he lost entirely the use of all his senses, and could neither hear, see, nor smell. His hands also became so firmly clenched, that it would be impossible to open them without breaking the fingers. Nevertheless, Dr. Ciri, the physician under whose charge he was placed, discovered that the epigastric region, at about two fingers breadth above the navel, received all the impressions of the senses, so as to replace them completely. If the patient was spoken to whilst the finger was placed on this spot, he gave answers, and even, when desired, opened his hands of his own accord. If any substance or matter was placed there, he could describe its form and quality, its colour and smell. As long as the finger was kept on the stomach, the convulsion gradually diminished until it entirely disappeared; but if the finger were placed on the heart, the convulsion returned with increased violence, and continued as long as the finger was kept in that position. If a flute was played while the finger was kept on the stomach, the patient heard the music; but if the finger was taken away, and placed on the heart, and then taken back again to its former position, the man asked why they played by intervals; yet the flute had never ceased. These experiments were all made in the presence of the professors and students of the hospital.

These pictures are correct in their outline, but the artists have not spared their colours. They will remind us, who are learned in legends, of that illusive monomania among the monks of Mount Athos, who believed that they could at pleasure attain a celestial vision by communing devoutly with the Deity, while their attention or their sight were directed to the umbilicus! And they were therefore called “Omphalopsychians.” We discover also very close analogies to this mental concentration, in the acuteness with which one sense is endowed on the failure of another. The delicacy of touch in the blind is often extreme; I knew a blind lady who played an excellent rubber, passing her finger lightly over the card spots; and more curious still are the cases of Miss M’Avoy, of Stanley the organist, and of Professor Saunderson. De Luc tells us of a lady, who read distinctly by passing her fingers over the page, even of a strange book. In Laura Bridgman, an American girl, an inmate of the Institution of Boston since 1837, the whole faculty of perception was concentrated in the one sense of touch. At the age of two, sight, and hearing, and smelling, and almost taste, deserted her. To this interesting creature, through the acuteness of her sense of touch in tracing letters, has been imparted so much knowledge, that the moral sentiments and the congenial affections of the heart are now beautifully displayed in her character.

If by the dumb alphabet, or finger-talking, conversation is commenced with her, she follows the fingers with her arm with extreme rapidity, so that scarce a letter escapes her. Such are the wonders of this child’s intelligence, that her mind has been cited as illustrative of innate sentiment; but the very facility is enough to explain her actions.

“I saw yesterday a young lady who has been frequently magnetized, and who, on my visit, presented some very remarkable circumstances. After a fit of indigestion she fell into the ecstatic state, in which she continued when I saw her. Her skin was perfectly insensible, and her eyes were open like animals’ in whom the fifth pair of nerves has been divided. She could perceive light, knew the difference between day and night for instance, but she could see and distinguish nothing else. She could not speak, but by signs expressed that her intellect was unusually active. But the most remarkable of the phenomena she presented was a singular exaltation of the sense of hearing. So extraordinarily delicate had this become, that she distinctly perceived sounds inaudible to myself and several other persons.”

Carus, unmindful of the existence of a state of abstract reverie resembling sleep, records the case of a young ecclesiastic, who composed sermons in a state of slumber, correcting and adding to them with peculiar care. And this is the deduction: that the sense of vision seemed to be transferred to the fingers, as the eyes were perfectly blinded to the writing paper. His eyes, when he sat for his portrait, should have been painted at the tips of his fingers.

James Mitchell, congenitally deaf and blind, discriminated his friends from strangers, and even formed a fair estimate of character, by the smell of the parties. And there was a deaf woman (writes Le Cat) who could read, and even tell the difference of languages, from the silent motion of the lip.

For so strange are the synonymes of the senses, that the blind will express their notion of colour by sound; the tint of scarlet is like the sound of a trumpet. From this hint, probably, St. Amand, in the “Pilgrims of the Rhine,” speaks of a visible music.

Ida. Do we not perceive, also, something of this acuteness in the sense of touch under certain other conditions? In the story of Caspar Hauser, whether it be romance or reality, we read the following illustration of the effect of mineral traction:

“Once, when the physician, Dr. Osterhausen, and the royal crown fiscal, Brunner, from Munich, happened to be present, Daumer led Caspar, in order to try him, to a table covered with an oil cloth, upon which lay a sheet of paper, and desired him to say whether any metal was under it. He moved his finger over it, and then said, ‘There it draws.’ ‘But this time,’ replied Daumer, ‘you are nevertheless mistaken, for,’ withdrawing the paper, ‘nothing lies under it.’ Caspar seemed at first to be somewhat embarrassed, but he put his finger again to the place where he thought he had felt the drawing, and assured them repeatedly that he there felt a drawing. The oil cloth was then removed, a stricter search was made, and a needle was actually found there.”

Caspar Hauser might have felt this, or a cunning youth might have palmed on us his idea for a truth. Yet I confess Parkinson also relates the case of a woman who fainted on the touch of a stethoscope, exclaiming that it was “drawing her too strongly.”

“M. Feruss was present at the experiment. A watch was held behind the individual’s head. ‘I see,’ said he, ‘something that shines.’ ‘What is it?’ ‘A watch.’ He was asked the hour, and replied exactly. Two different watches were tried. He was equally precise. The watches were taken out of the room, and the hands altered. He still told the hours and minutes expressed on the dials.”

“Mr. Barnaby (’twas at Bow-street) took his watch from his pocket, and said, ‘What have I got in my hand?’ ‘A watch,’ was the reply.—‘What is it made of?’ ‘Gold.’—‘What chain is attached to it?’ ‘None at all,’ said the boy: ‘there is a riband to it.’—‘Can you tell at what hour the hand stands?’ ‘Yes, at twelve.’ Mr. B. showed his watch, and the hands were at twelve precisely. Mr. B. then produced his purse from his pocket, and asked the boy the colour of it, and what it contained, and his answers were, without having the least opportunity of turning round towards the bench, that one end of the purse was brown, and the other yellow, and that the brown end contained sovereigns, and the yellow end silver. Mr. B. admitted the correctness of the description, and, taking some silver from his pocket, asked the boy to describe the different pieces. ‘What is this?’ ‘Sixpence,’ said the boy, ‘and of the date 1819.’—‘What is the next?’ ‘A shilling, and dated 1816,’ was the reply. And when the clerk brought forth another coin, and asked similar questions, the boy said, ‘That is a sixpence of the date of 1817;’ and all these guesses proved to be correct.”

Ev. A little more sifting of these cases, Astrophel, and they would resemble that of the cataleptic female of Amiens, related by Petelin; who also professed to tell the spots of a card, unseen by her. But it was discovered that the physician glided it beneath the bedclothes. Or that told by Bertrand, of another ecstatic female:—“While lying entranced in a chamber illuminated by a candle, her ring was removed from her finger by Monsieur Bertrand, and given to a person standing near him. She was asked who had her ring,—‘Mr. Eyre has it in his trowsers pocket.’ Mr. Bertrand exclaimed that she was wrong, for it was not to Mr. Eyre the ring was given. The lady persisted in her statement, and, on immediate inquiry, it was found that the person who first was given the ring had secretly conveyed it to Mr. Eyre.”

The pages of history are not deficient in these pretensions to miracle. From Ulrick Zwingle we learn that Thomas Aquinas, the evangelical doctor, professed, by intense thought, to throw himself into ecstacy; in which, strange visions and mysteries of another existence passed before him.

Matthew Paris writes of a monk of Evesham, and of a certain Sir Owen, that, in one of these ecstacies, was favoured with an introduction into Saint Patrick’s purgatory. So the mad visionary, Jacob Bœhm, fell into many strange trances, and at last were revealed to him,—“The origin of nature; the formation of all things; and even divine principles and intelligent natures!”

But the case of Santa Theresa, if we can but believe the testimony of so accomplished an hypocrite, presents phenomena far more remarkable than all these. “Her frame was naturally delicate, her imagination lively, and her mind, incapable of being fixed by trivial objects, turned with avidity to those which religion offered, the moment they were presented to her view. But, unfortunately, meeting with the writings of Saint Jerome, she became enamoured of the monastic life, and, quitting the line for which nature designed her, she renounced the most endearing ties, and bound herself by the irrevocable vow. Deep melancholy then seized on her, and increased to such a degree, that for many days she lay both motionless and senseless, like one who is in a trance. Her tender frame, thus shaken, prepared her for ecstacies and visions, such as it might appear invidious to repeat, were they not related by herself and by her greatest admirers. She tells us that, in the fervour of her devotion, she not only became insensible to every thing around her, but that her body was often lifted up from the earth, although she endeavoured to resist the motion. And Bishop Yessen relates in particular, that, when she was going to receive the Eucharist at Avila, she was raised in a rapture higher than the grate, through which, as is usual in nunneries, it was presented to her. She often heard the voice of God, when she was recovered from a trance; but sometimes the devil, by imitation, endeavoured to deceive her, yet she was always able to detect the fraud.”

Yet the modern proselytes to Mesmerism would scarcely believe this a fiction, but an illustration of that lucid vision which may, it is believed, be so highly excited, as to associate the being with universal nature: a creed grounded on the expansion or illimitable nature of thought or mind, by which it seems to leave the body, carrying with it its consciousness.

So the disciples of Mesmer asserted, that, when they thought or spoke warmly of absent persons, they would both appear in their eidōlon; and also that they were, at that exact time, speaking or thinking of them. This was Shelley’s conviction, that minds sympathetically imparted ideas and thoughts,—particles, indeed, of the “mens divinior.” So that they might well see in the dark.

Brown would be in a flood of joy to hear the affirmations of these ecstatics, whose spirits, as they believe and avow, are for the time released from the chains of mortality. “Why,” exclaimed one of these half-spiritualized creatures,—“Why do you bring me again to life? Would you depart from me, my body would grow cold, my soul would not return to it, and I should be happy.”

Astr. You are fond of caricature, Evelyn. I speak of sober truths only. I am told that the powers of acquirement may be so increased by magnetism, as to resemble new faculties. A lady, during a sort of ecstacy, sung most scientifically church music; although, when awake, she entirely failed, and had forgotten all. And others will speak languages and sentiments, of which they are perfectly unconscious when awake.

There was a girl in the vicinity of Bedford Row, of whose case there are related similar wonders of this magnetically-imparted accomplishment; and her beauty was so enchanting, as to transcend the brightest visions of Michael Angelo or Correggio.