What happens then?

When the patients see, the seat of the sensations is exactly the part that is magnetized; when their eyes are bandaged, they locate these same sensations by chance, sometimes in parts very far away from those to which the magnetizer is directing his attention.  The patient, whose eyes are covered, often feels marked effects at a time when they are not magnetizing him, and remains, on the contrary, quite passive while they are magnetizing him, without his being aware of it.

Persons of all classes offer similar anomalies.  An instructed physician, subjected to these experiments, “feels effects whilst nothing is being done, and often does not feel effects while he is being acted upon.  On one occasion, thinking that they had been magnetizing him for ten minutes, this same doctor fancied that he felt a heat in his lumbi, which he compared to that of a stove.”

Sensations thus felt, when no magnetizing was exerted, must evidently have been the effect of imagination.

The commissioners were too strict logicians to confine themselves with these experiments.  They had established that imagination, in some individuals, can occasion pain, and heat—­even a considerable degree of heat—­in all parts of the body; but practical female Mesmerizers did more; they agitated certain people to that pitch, that they fell into convulsions.  Could the effect of imagination go so far?

Some new experiments entirely did away with these doubts.

A young man was taken to Franklin’s garden at Passy, and when it was announced to him that Deslon, who had taken him there, had magnetized a tree, this young man ran about the garden, and fell down in convulsions, but it was not under the magnetized tree:  the crisis seized him while he was embracing another tree, very far from the former.

Deslon selected, in the treatment of poor people, two women who had rendered themselves remarkable by their sensitiveness around the famous rod, and took them to Passy.  These women fell into convulsions whenever they thought themselves mesmerized, although they were not.  At Lavoisier’s, the celebrated experiment of the cup gave analogous results.  Some plain water engendered convulsions occasionally, when magnetized water did not.

We must really renounce the use of our reason, not to perceive a proof in this collection of experiments, so well arranged that imagination alone can produce all the phenomena observed around the mesmeric rod, and that mesmeric proceedings, cleared from the delusions of imagination, are absolutely without effect.  The commissioners, however, recommence the examination on these last grounds, multiply the trials, adopt all possible precautions, and give to their conclusions the evidence of mathematical demonstrations.  They establish, finally and experimentally, that the action of the imagination can both occasion the crises to cease, and can engender their occurrence.