h it is unsusceptible? If we ascribe it to a power
already ascertained, why not treat it, at least, as an entirely new
function of that power? Why limit it to what we know, when,
possibly, it may be destined to extend the boundaries of our
knowledge? Why are we to be trammelled with foregone conclusions?
Yet upon these very restrictions the opponents of mesmerism insist;
thus taking away from men the means of investigating the agency in
question, by forcing them to set about it in the wrong way."--(P.
12.)

Having, then, thus expressed himself in the early part of the work,
towards the close we find the following sentence. "Taking this simple
view of sensation, (that objects should be brought into a certain
relation with us by something intermediate,) we find nothing in
mesmerism contradictory of nature. Under its influence, the human frame
continues to be still a system of nerves acted upon by elastic media,
for the purpose of conveying to us the primal impulse of the Almighty
Mind, which made, sustains, and moves the universe--having, as I trust,
shown the conformity of mesmerism in all essential points with the
principles of nature, and the inferences of reason," &c. &c.

If we are to admit mesmerism as a series of facts apparently
inconsistent with experience, it is most hasty and unphilosophical to
attempt to generalize it by crude hypotheses. To rest its probable truth
upon these hypotheses, is to take a totally different ground, and one
much lower and more assailable. We have no desire to be
hypercritical--to expose minor scientific inaccuracies in the work
before us; but we do not hesitate to assert, that, independently of its
inconsistency with the previous course of reasoning, the hypothesis or
hypotheses of Mr Townshend are most unsatisfactory.

Heat, light, electricity, magnetism, are by some regarded as specific
fluids; by others, as undulations of one or more specific fluid; and by
a third class, as undulations or polarizations of ordinary matter. Thus,
by the first, light would be viewed as a material emanation from the
luminous body; by the second, as an undulation of an imponderable ether,
existing between the luminous body and the recipient; and by the third,
as an undulation of the air, glass, or other matter, placed between the
luminous body and the object. The last would regard the ether in the
planetary spaces, not as a specific imponderable fluid, but as a