n that process there was the danger
of society going to pieces--of the visionary frenzy of the possessed being
taken up by fanatics as the foundation of a new and abominable religion,
and of the hostility of the ignorant and uneducated class, among whom
chiefly the possession prevailed, being directed against the restraints of
government and the principle of property. Having adopted the other course,
they pushed it to cruel and inexcusable lengths; punished many innocent
persons, and suffered many of the really possessed to go free. For they
whose madness was most to be apprehended, as most contagious, were not the
wretches who fancied they possessed the power of bewitching others; but
the _convulsionnaires_, who deemed themselves bewitched, and were their
accusers. Certainly if the same epidemic should ever again break out among
a European population, or even among a British population, the arm of the
magistrate would be again required to suppress it, and we would be better
able to judge of the conduct of those whom it has been the fashion of
modern historians to represent as altogether ignorant and brutal
executioners. So long as possession is only the result of manual passes,
or of fixing the gaze on indifferent objects; so long as the effects are
regarded as physical or psychological phenomena, due to a physical cause,
and the pretensions of the practitioner are not rested on any peculiar
religious sanction, there is no danger of mesmerism degenerating into a
dangerous epidemic; but we might have seen a very different state of
affairs if the magnetizers and biologists had referred their powers to any
species of supernatural agency; and possibly would have found ourselves
long since under the necessity of reviving those penal proceedings which
we have so generally been taught to abhor, as among the most revolting
remnants of mediaeval superstition.(5) Even as it is, these powers of the
biologist, if in truth they exist, are capable of fearful abuse. Let us
take, for example, one of the oldest methods of exercising influence, for
good or evil, on an absent person:--

"As fire this figure hardens, made of clay,
And this of wax with fire consumes away;
Such let the soul of cruel Daphnis be,
Hard to the rest of women, soft to me."

If the waxen or clay image be but a concentrator of the good or evil will
of the operator towards the distant object, and the witchcraft of the
love-sick magician in Virgil, or of the