1906: Lecture to the Society of Unapplied Sciences
Gentlemen—
I stand before you under the tentative banner of “experimental metaphysics,” which, as you well know, means whatever the speaker wishes until the audience grows restless enough to disagree. I propose tonight to attempt a small act of intellectual conjuring: to examine those charming twins of fascination—magic and science—and to test, gently, whether either has any real claim upon the other, or whether both merely share the same tailor.
Let me begin with a word. Mesmerise. It rolls from the tongue with the slightly oily glide of a well-fed cat. One is mesmerised, never simply interested. Josephine Mornwell, in her newly deplored volume On the Domestic Theatre of the Mind, says the mesmerist “establishes an empire upon the retina of another.” How admirably autocratic!
And then there is hypnotise: the word sounds more surgical, as if requiring a license or a certificate in Latin. “The operator induces the trance as a chemist precipitates a crystal,” says Dr. Vardon Blissfield, whose laboratory, by the way, is also his conservatory, a detail that has led to several incidents with slumbering begonias.
The difference, I suspect, lies only in who performs the act—and how expensive their furniture is. Mesmerism is conducted in velvet rooms with mysterious draperies, attended by silence broken only by admiration. Hypnotism, by contrast, smells faintly of disinfectant. It is executed, if not explained, by men who believe themselves to be scientists.
Indeed, in technical circles one may be hypnotised by procedure, but in polite society one is only ever mesmerised by beauty—a linguistic division that has saved many reputations and ruined a few marriages.
Now to Baron Carl von Reichenbach, that eminent industrialist who decided that steelworks were insufficiently luminous and thus turned to the invisible. His “Odic Force,” proposed in the year of our disappointment, 1845, was nothing less than a universal emotion in physical form: a faint glimmer seen by those of a “sensitive disposition.” Od was, he maintained, the divine cousin of electricity—more spiritual than galvanism, less vulgar than magnetism, and altogether more flattering to the human race.
I met one lady who swore she saw Od streaming from her husband’s pipe every evening at six precisely, though she admitted it might have been smoke and tedium entwined. The Baron himself—dear visionary—claimed that his force linked heaven to hearth, God to galvanometer, and the mind to the furnishing of the salon.
If that is not magic, then I do not know what is—save that, under certain conditions, a scientist may name his enchantment and thus absolve himself of superstition.
Mesmer, that first apostle of the invisible tide, believed we are all small magnets in human form—little compass needles of desire, vibrating in mutual recognition. He was, naturally, denounced by everyone except his patients, which is not unlike being a poet in Parliament. His “magnetic passes” over the body were intended to smooth the waves of vital fluid, much as one might iron the conscience.
A Mr. Hobson of Chelsea—an accountant with metaphysical leanings—once told me that his wife fell into convulsions merely by reading the word “magnetism” aloud. That, gentlemen, is what I would call a receptive temperament.
It is remarkable how often magnetism, animal or otherwise, has excused acts better described as courtship—or assault. The mesmerist, gazing intently at his subject, murmuring assurances of spiritual elevation, often arrived at a form of intimacy that, in another setting, would require champagne. To be magnetised, then, is a social position—one of exquisite vulnerability and implied consent to experiment.
You see, when one says spell, the mind rushes to witches, Latin, and inadequate lighting. When one says procedure, one is granted a small stipend by the Royal Society. Yet the effect is not dissimilar: a subject is immobilised, instructed, and possibly improved; the operator gestures in rhythmic patterns; something mysterious (often the same thing) passes between them. The rest is commentary.
Every age invents its euphemisms for enchantment. The ancients had Circe; the Victorians have “psychological phenomena.” The only difference lies in who keeps the notebooks.
Aesculapian physicians still talk of “expectant attention”—a phrase that might equally describe a séance, a sermon, or a scandal. Reichenbach’s followers used violet filters to observe luminous vapours around stones, metals, and the finer sex. Reportedly, blue flames emanated from the fingertips of sopranos. One poor baritone, on discovering he emitted none, retired from performance and took up theology.
Ah, Circe. That Circean quality—bewitching, delicious, ruinous. It is the essential fragrance of art, politics, and certain afternoons. The myth tells us she transformed men into swine, but perhaps, as Mrs. Delacroix once observed at the Royal Academy, “They were only restored to their original shapes.”
The Circean allure persists in the modern lecturer, though in humbler form: we aim to transform ignorance into astonishment and back again before the hour ends. I assure you, gentlemen, I take no responsibility for permanent transfigurations.
There is, however, the same erotics of control. Circe used potions, Mesmer used magnets, and we use diagrams—but do not mistake that triangle on the blackboard for a triviality. A sufficiently exaggerated diagram is indistinguishable from a sigil.
Miracle, illusion, pseudoscience—these are our modern trinity, perpetually rearranging their habits to suit the congregation. A miracle is an event our apparatus fails to explain; an illusion is an event we don’t wish to explain; pseudoscience is the explanation offered by a man who has mistaken the former for the latter.
Permit an example: Dr. Havelock Pease, in his recent talk On the Transfusional Aura, declared that ordinary water, exposed to the gaze of a confident person for seven minutes, acquires “moral warmth.” He demonstrated this by pouring two glasses and asking his subjects to taste which was more trustworthy. The audience chose the one that had been poured from a larger jug. He concluded, triumphantly, that volume influences virtue. The report is pending publication in The Annals of Suggestive Chemistry.
Yet, who among us could swear he is not swayed by such moral water? Faith, after all, is only the economy of wonder. And wonder, however catalogued, remains the oldest intoxicant in the city.
Now, gentlemen, we must admit a hypocrisy: technical men are magicians embarrassed by precision. The physicist quantifies a mystery, the metaphysician complicates it, and the spiritualist sells tickets for its reappearance. Illusion becomes the coin of both drawing room and laboratory.
Consider a trivial demonstration I performed yesterday afternoon: I placed a pendulum above a bowl of mercury and wished it to move. When it did not, I wished more responsibly, invoking Reichenbach. When it moved—through no agency of mine, unless you count the draft from the maid—I recorded it faithfully as Odic interference. Faithfulness, as any observer knows, is the enemy of accuracy and the friend of reputation.
It is the act of naming that renders a phenomenon obedient. To call it “a current” or “a field” is to tuck it under the starched linen of theory, yet beneath—the restless pulse of the uncanny persists. We build cages of terminology for our angels and then complain they no longer sing.
May I confess a professional hazard? Every lecturer, gentle or otherwise, secretly mesmerises his listeners. Observe yourselves now: the stillness, the pattern of your attention, that slight tilt of the head signalling open receptivity—what is that if not trance?
If I were to lower my voice—thus—and draw from my pocket this silver ring (which catches the gaslight most obligingly), some of you would already feel the coat of gravity loosening from your shoulders. Others would resist, in the polite way of Englishmen confronted with sincerity. The effect is precisely equivalent to Mesmer’s passes, though I assure you the results are less scandalous.
Language, too, may hypnotise: each word is a motion of the mind’s hand. “Gentlemen,” “Truth,” “Phenomenon”—these are our pendulums. They swing before the intellect while something else unseen rearranges the furniture of belief.
Suppose, for argument’s sake, that the Odic force truly pervades us. Then every act of politeness becomes an exchange of cosmic particles; every handshake, an electrical circuit; every sigh, a disturbance in the magnetic field of etiquette. Under such circumstances, ignorance would be fatal. Imagine thrilling one’s neighbour’s aura without permission! The courts would be full for centuries.
Theologians would, no doubt, seize on the matter. The Archdeacon of Lewes declared last month that “if the soul be luminous, it must also cast shadows,” thereby inventing, without quite meaning to, metaphysical sunburn.
You see the trouble: whenever we try to measure the miraculous, it hides behind the ruler.
And so, gentlemen, after this little promenade through the territories of illusion, mesmerism, and other profitable perplexities, where are we?
We find that mesmerism differs from hypnotism as poetry from procedure: the first seduces, the second qualifies for funding. That pseudoscience is merely the literature of experiment, crafting fictions more elaborate than its authors suspect. That “animal magnetism” and “Odic force” are not discoveries but metaphors behaving badly.
And yet, somehow, these delusions—these decorative failures—carry truth in disguise. The mesmerist’s theatre and the scientist’s laboratory remain opposite wings of the same house, each conducting séances for a different deity.
I could, of course, conclude by urging rationality. But you would not believe me—nor, I confess, would I. For even the most decorous intellect yearns occasionally to be spellbound; to surrender, for a heartbeat, to the Circean shimmer that makes all knowledge possible and impossible in the same breath.
Observe, then, the light upon the lectern—this simple gas flame. If you watch long enough, gentlemen, you may perceive it quiver… almost to thought… almost to speech…
And should you feel a certain warmth tracing the air between us, do not be alarmed. It may be only the Odic current of mutual curiosity—or merely the comfort of shared delusion, which, after all, is the noblest form of truth we have managed to invent.
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