the magnetic power which binds stars and men. In
the middle of the seventeenth century, Helmont connects this power of
magnetic attraction and repulsion with an ethereal element which
penetrates all bodies and keeps them in motion. Through it man, too, can
by his mere imagination work on other men. This will can also be
effective on drugs which get through it a special therapeutic power.
Somewhat different was the theory of a Scotch physician, Maxwell, in the
second half of the seventeenth century. The ethereal spirit, which is
identical with light, can be artificially cumulated in any organism and
that secures its health. As one man can influence this vivifying ether
in any other man, he can produce cures even from a great distance. All
diseases are merely reductions of this ethereal spirit in the organism.

But the general stream of the explanation continued in the direction of
the magnetic doctrine. It was especially Mesmer in the eighteenth
century who, in a long life of fantastic mysticism and yet of universal
serious study, surely contributed much to the development of the theory.
He had started to use, like others, the magnet in his medical practice.
But he discovered that the same therapeutic successes could be gained
without applying the magnet itself, but by simply using his own hands.
The patients became cured when he moved his hands slowly from their
heads to their feet. The magnetic power was therefore evidently in man
himself. It was an animal magnetism in opposition to the mineral one
which belonged to the magnet and to the stars. He believed further that
he was able to infuse this magnetic power into any lifeless thing, which
would then have curative influence on the nerves. There can be no doubt
that, whatever may have been the value of his theories, he cured a large
number of patients, evidently producing a state which we would call
today a hypnoid state and often simply appealing to the natural
suggestibility of the impressionable minds. Among his pupils, usually
called mesmerists, was Puyseyur, who discovered, in 1784, the state
which was called artificial somnambulism, a kind of sleep in which the
ideas and feelings of the magnetized can be guided by the magnetizer.
Here evidently was the first recognition of the psychotherapeutic
variation which we call today hypnotism. There followed a period in
which the scientific interest of the physicians was somewhat sidetracked
by an unsound connection of th