We have already remarked that the Commissioners of the Academy and of the Faculty did not assert that the Mesmeric meetings were always ineffectual.  They only saw in the crises the mere results of imagination; nor did any sort of magnetic fluid reveal itself to their eyes.  I will also prove, that imagination alone generated the refutation that Servan gave to Bailly’s theory.  “You deny,” exclaims the attorney-general, “you deny, gentlemen commissioners, the existence of the fluid which Mesmer has made to act such an important part!  I maintain, on the contrary, not only that this fluid exists, but also that it is the medium by the aid of which all the vital functions are excited; I assert that imagination is one of the phenomena engendered by this agent; that its greater or less abundance in this or that among our organs, may totally change the normal intellectual state of individuals.”

Everybody agrees that too great a flow of blood towards the brain produces a stupefaction of the mind.  Analogous or inverse effects might evidently be produced by a subtle, invisible, imponderable fluid, by a sort of nervous fluid, or magnetic fluid (if this term be preferred), circulating through our organs.  And the commissioners took good care not to speak on this subject of impossibility.  Their thesis was more modest; they contented themselves with saying that nothing demonstrated the existence of such a fluid.  Imagination, therefore, had no share in their report; but in Servan’s refutation, on the contrary, imagination was the chief actor.

One thing that was still less proved, if possible, than any of those that we have been speaking of, is the influence that the magnetic fluid of the magnetizer might exert on the magnetized person.

In magnetism, properly so called, in that which physicists have studied with so much care and success, the phenomena are constant.  They are reproduced exactly under the same conditions of form, of duration, and of quantity, when certain bodies, being present to each other, find themselves exactly in the same relative positions.  That is the essential and necessary character of all purely material and mechanical action.  Was it thus in the pretended phenomena of animal magnetism?  In no way.  To-day the crises would occur in the space of some seconds; to-morrow they may require several entire hours; and finally, on another day, other circumstances remaining the same, the effect would be positively null.  A certain magnetizer exercised a brisk action on a certain patient, and was absolutely powerless on another who, on the contrary, entered into a crisis under the earliest efforts of a second magnetizer.  Instead of one or two universal fluids, there must, then, to explain the phenomena, be as many distinct fluids, and constantly acting, as there exist animated or inanimate beings in the world.