ctor
commenced with great zeal, and with every appearance of faith in his own
powers. No effect, however, was produced on this lady, or on one or two
more of the party, all of whom obstinately refused even to gape. M.
C---- gave the matter up, and soon after took his leave, and thus closed
my personal connexion with animal magnetism.

If you ask me for the conclusions I have drawn from these facts, I shall
be obliged to tell you, that I am in doubt how far the parties concerned
deceived others, and how far they deceived themselves. It is difficult
to discredit entirely all the testimony that has been adduced in behalf
of this power; and one is consequently obliged to refer all the
established facts to the influence of the imagination. Then testimony
itself is but a precarious thing, different eyes seeing the same objects
in different lights.

Let us take ventriloquism as a parallel case to that of animal
magnetism. Ventriloquism is neither more nor less than imitation; and
yet, aided by the imagination, perhaps a majority of those who know
anything about it, are inclined to believe there is really such a
faculty as that which is vulgarly attributed to ventriloquism. The whole
art of the ventriloquist consists in making such sounds as would be
produced by a person, or thing, that should be actually in the
circumstances that he wishes to represent. Let there be, for instance,
five or six sitting around a table, in a room with a single door; a
ventriloquist among them wishes to mislead his companions, by making
them believe that another is applying for admission. All he has to do,
is to make a sound similar to that which a person on the outside would
make, in applying for admission. "Open the door, and let me in," uttered
in such a manner, would deceive any one who was not prepared for the
experiment, simply because men do not ordinarily make such sounds when
sitting near each other, because the words themselves would draw the
attention to the door, and because the sounds would be suited to the
fictitious application. If there were _two_ doors, the person first
moving his head towards one of them, would probably give a direction to
the imaginations of all the others; unless, indeed, the ventriloquist
himself, by his words, or his own movements, as is usually the case,
should assume the initiative. Every ventriloquist takes especial care to
_direct_ the imagination of his listener to the desired point, either by
what he s