his waistcoat.

To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eyes; and, in an evil moment, it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know the success of my measure and it succeeded too well. When the boy was again questioned, his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not to be found. In his distress he looked down for it - it was to be seen no more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his place."

Again, we may observe that that action of the physical consciousness, which relates to the operation of our senses, is far more linked with memory than is the intellectual operation of consciousness. That which we have seen, heard, and felt, we remember far more strongly than that which we have only thought. The immediate action of the sensual consciousness is also peculiarly renovative of that which is past. The smell of a flower, which we knew in former days, will recall a thousand old forgotten feelings; and the tinkling of a sheep-bell will bring before us the wild heath, or the grassy hill-side, where our childhood sported. Thus, when the poet invokes memory, he does not summon her to appear in the pomp of intellectual splendour, but he says

"Come from the woods that belt the grey hill-side,
The seven elms, the poplars four,

That stand beside my father's door,

And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o'er matted cress, and ribbed sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves."

TENNYSON.

Now let us consider that, to a mesmeric patient, the ordinary sensual consciousness is closed, that the motive of consciousness has ceased to be introspective,―in fine, that all the conditions of consciousness are unusual. Can we, then, wonder, either that he cannot grasp mesmeric memories in his normal state, or that he should return to them with ease and perfection as soon as the unwonted conditions of his mesmeric existence are restored? To understand this perfectly, we have only to extend the principle whereby we lose or recover any train of thought whatever. Thus epileptics have been known to finish, in a new paroxysm of their complaint, a sentence begun in an attack which had occurred days or weeks before; and every one must remember the quaint story of the old gentleman who, in passing a particular bridge, answered a question that had been put to him long ago on the same spot. "Do you like peas or beans best for dinner?" his old domestic had inquired, as he rode soberly behind his master. There was no reply; but, just a year after, when master and man were jogging on as before, the former turned slowly round, and said, "Peas, John."

Certain facts, relative to the mesmeric state, still further confirm our previous view of the question. Sometimes, when mesmeric sleepwaking is not perfect, it seems to alternate with the natural state; and the patient, occasionally waking, as it were, for a few moments, employs his ordinary senses in the ordinary way. Now, by frequent experience, I have ascertained that the remembrance which these patients

retain of circumstances that occurred during their sleepwaking is in exact proportion to the usual action of their senses; in other words, to their approximations to their ordinary conditions of consciousness. the fabled Lethe is only to be found where consciousness flows on through channels that are altogether unwonted.

The real waters of oblivion

Thus, then, if I have shown, in a former book, that mesmeric sleepwaking is a peculiar state, and therefore worthy of distinct investigation, I have now proved that, though peculiar, it is in harmony with the general laws of our mental constitution; and therefore proper to be classed with other metaphysical phenomena incident to man. I am, indeed, far from saying that it presents no extraordinary appearances; but I must assert that it is by no means one of those subjects in which we cannot arrive at a comprehension of things unknown by that with which we are already acquainted. Every common reverie is a sort of mesmeric slumber; and an absent man lives, as it were, in a mesmeric world. In order to have a perfect idea of mesmeric sleepwaking, as far as regards the patient merely and his mental condition, we have only to imagine a fusion between the two known states of reverie and of abstraction; for the mesmeric sleep approximates to the first in its singleness of consciousness, its deadness to external stimulants, and its complete after-forgetfulness: while it resembles the latter in coherence of thought and intellectual development.

SECT. III.

ON MESMERIC SENSATION.

HAVING shown that the metaphysical condition of mesmeric patients is in harmony with general laws and with personal experience, it is now my intention to offer some observations, whereby the phenomena of sensation, in the mesmeric state, may also be brought nearer to our convictions.

In attempting this, I must necessarily sometimes abandon the region of purely personal experience. The real causes of even our ordinary sensation (though they may be made mathematically evident to reason) are themselves at variance with our common feelings, and are altogether hidden from the perception of the vulgar. Yet to these real causes I must appeal in explanation of mesmeric phenomena. In order to reveal one and the same base for normal and for mesmeric sensation, I must pierce that which seems, and penetrate to that which is. Yet will it, I trust, be found that, wherever the subject permits, I retain that best mode of argument- the argumentum ad hominem.

Already I have remarked that, sensation being really seated in the mind, a change in its pre-requisites can never imply an abolition of itself. But we may affirm more than this, and adduce facts which

shall afford us the strongest presumption that, in the mesmeric state, the pre-requisites of sensation, however changed, are only altered in conformity with established laws; in fine, that the development of mesmeric feeling is in perfect accordance with nature. That it has not hitherto appeared so, seems to be rather the fault of its expositors than the necessity of its own mode of action. They who would examine into the conditions of mesmeric perception are, in general, so engrossed by its more prominent and superficial wonders, that they rest in external differences of development, instead of going deeper to discover internal identity of origin. They look merely to unusual effects, and do not consider that the causes of these may be such as are actually familiar to us.

The pervading peculiarity of mesmeric perception may be thus briefly expressed:

Inaction of the external apparatus of the senses, co-existent with the life and activity of some inner source of feeling.

That such an apparent anomaly is not so far removed from the ordinary operations of our being, as on a cursory view of things we might suppose, I trust in the course of the following reflections to demon

strate.

Every fact, adduced to prove the reality of mesmeric perception, has been hitherto met with but one argument, which your established formalist-your limiter of Providence and its resources, deems unanswerable. "Our external organs are the sole appointed means of sensation. How would you then