general conclusions, are the reports of the French
Academy and the testimonies of all rigorous and well-conducted
scientific examination. These testimonies apply to facts which it is the
duty of those experimentalists and physiologists, who have time and
opportunity at their disposal, fairly to investigate.

The insensibility to pain, and to the effects of the galvanic shock, are
also within the limits of the credible--and the latter is the more easy
of proof, as being incapable of simulation. As we stated at the
commencement, so we repeat here; mesmerism has been too little
investigated by competent persons, and is too much mystified by
charlatanism, to enable us accurately to define the limits of the true
and false, far less to predict what may be the discoveries to which it
may lead. With regard to the facts of clairvoyance, we are at present
entirely incredulous. Mr Townshend says, p. 91--

"Let, then, body after body of learned men deny the phenomena of
mesmerism, and logically disprove their existence; an appeal may
ever, and at any moment, be made to the proof by experiment; and
even should experiment itself fail a thousand times, the success of
the thousandth and first trial would justify further examination.
Till the authority of observation can be wholly set aside, the
subject of our enquiry can never be said to have undergone its
final ostracism."

This is certainly a strong proposition; nevertheless it is with the hope
that observation may be directed to the _facts_ of mesmerism, that we
have written the preceding pages. In reasoning on a subject, we can use
only those lights which experience has given us. The efficacy of logical
disproof, somewhat contemptuously treated by Mr Townshend in the above
passage, is yet fully vindicated by the latter half of the book itself,
which is an endeavour, logically, to bring home mesmerism to the
understanding of men of experience. It is vain to make light of logic,
when the parties who set it at nought are themselves obliged to use it
to prove its own worthlessness. You must not exalt _reason_, and we will
give you the _reason_ why--this cuts their own ground from under them.
We so far agree with the last quoted sentence, as to admit that, when
experiments fairly tried by competent parties have and do succeed,
mesmerism will be established--hitherto they have _not_ succeeded. The
alleged proofs are not brought home to the observ