of
as through their disengagement from normal experience they are capable
of verification. They are the people of what the alienist calls the
"idee fixe." Everything for them centers about one idea; they have one
key and one only to the marvellous complexity of life. Such a temper as
this naturally disassociates them from reality and makes them
contemptuous of contradictory experiences.

_Mesmerism is Carried to America; Phineas Quimby an Important Link in a
Long Chain_

America has been far too rich in such a temper as this and it was never
more so than in the forties and the fifties of the last century.
Mesmerism crossed the ocean and while Braid and later Bernheim and
Charcot were following it through on sound, psychological lines and
bringing to bear upon it great insight and scientific discipline, it
fell here into the hands of charlatans and adventurers. Phineas
Parkhurst Quimby, best known for his connection with Mary Baker Eddy,
hardly deserves the name of charlatan, though he was dangerously near
being just that. He belonged to the border-land regions in thought and
propaganda and he did give to the whole complex movement which we have
been considering a direction which has played a relatively great part in
its later development. He had a shrewd mind which ranged over wide
regions; he is a pretty typical example of the half-disciplined,
forceful and original personality which has played so large a part in
American life. The New England of his time--Quimby was born in New
Hampshire and spent his life in Maine--was giving itself whole-heartedly
to a mysticism bounded on the one side (its higher and more
representative side) by Emerson and the transcendentalists and on the
other by healers, prophets of strange creeds and dreamers of Utopias.
Phrenology, mind reading, animal magnetism, clairvoyance, all had their
prophets.

Quimby belongs to this succession. His education was meagre, he did not
even know how to spell according to the dictionary or punctuate
according to the grammar.[20] He had his own peculiar use of words--a
use by which Mary Baker Eddy was doubtless greatly influenced. He had
marked mechanical ability and a real passion for facts. He was an
original thinker, little in debt to books for his ideas though he was
undoubtedly influenced by the temper of his environment to which
reference has already been made. He had a speculative, but not a trained
interest in religion and dealt freely with the