In conclusion, Bailly’s report completely upsets an accredited error.  This was an important service, nor was it the only one.  In searching for the imaginary cause of animal magnetism, they ascertained the real power that man can exert over man, without the immediate and demonstrable intervention of any physical agent; they established that “the most simple actions and signs sometimes produce most powerful effects; that man’s action on the imagination may be reduced to an art ... at least in regard to persons who have faith.”  This work finally showed how our faculties should be experimentally studied; in what way psychology may one day come to be placed among the exact sciences.

I have always regretted that the commissioners did not judge it expedient to add a historical chapter to their excellent work.  The immense erudition of Bailly would have given it an inestimable value.  I figure to myself, also, that in seeing the Mesmeric practices that have now been in use during upwards of two thousand years, the public would have asked itself whether so long an interval of time had ever been required to push a good and useful thing forward into estimation.  By circumscribing himself to this point of view, a few traits would have sufficed.

Plutarch, for example, would have come to the aid of the reporter.  He would have showed him Pyrrhus curing complaints of the spleen, by means of frictions made with the great toe of his right foot.  Without giving one’s self up to a wild spirit of interpretation, we might be permitted to see in that fact the germ of animal magnetism.  I admit that one circumstance would have rather unsettled the savant:  this was the white cock that the King of Macedon sacrificed to the gods before beginning these frictions.

Vespasian, in his turn, might have figured among the predecessors of Mesmer, in consequence of the extraordinary cures that he effected in Egypt by the action of his foot.  It is true that the pretended cure of an old blindness, only by the aid of a little of that emperor’s saliva, would have thrown some doubt on the veracity of Suetonius.

Homer and Achilles are not too far back but we might have invoked their names.  Joachim Camerarius, indeed, asserted having seen, on a very ancient copy of the Iliad, some verses that the copyists sacrificed because they did not understand them, and in which the poet alluded, not to the heel of Achilles (its celebrity has been well established these three thousand years,) but to the medical properties possessed by the great toe of that same hero’s right foot.

What I regret most is, the chapter in which Bailly might have related how certain adepts of Mesmer’s had the hardihood to magnetize the moon, so as, on a given day, to make all the astronomers devoted to observing that body fall into a syncope; a perturbation, by the way, that no geometer, from Newton to Laplace, had thought of.

The work of Bailly gave rise to trouble, spite, and anger, among the Mesmerists.  It was for many months the target for their combined attacks.  All the provinces of France saw refutations of the celebrated report arise:  sometimes under the form of calm discussions, decent and moderate; but generally with all the characteristics of violence, and the acrimony of a pamphlet.