Animal magnetism / by Alfred Binet and Charles Féré.

  • Alfred Binet
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Animal magnetism / by Alfred Binet and Charles Féré. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    going on. But the most curious experience of this kind was made in Deslon’s presence, much to his confusion. According to the theory, when a tree was magnetized, every person who approached it was affected by its influence. The experiment was made at Passy when Franklin was present. Deslon magnetized one tree in an orchard, and a boy of twelve years old, very sensitive to magnetism, was brought towards it with his eyes bandaged. At the first, second, and third tree, he turned giddy; at the fourth, when he was still at a distance of twenty-four feet from the magnetized tree, the crisis occurred, his limbs became rigid, and it was necessary to carry him to an adjoining grass-plat before Deslon could recall him to consciousness. All that these experiments show is that the preconceived idea may produce the same magnetic effects as purely physical means. This truth is well known to the performers of experiments. It is now an established fact that a subject may be thrown into a magnetic sleep, simply by assuring him that this will occur, and by the same process he may even be magnetized from a distance, if it is asserted that he will fall into somnambulism on a given day and hour, in any place which has been selected. The commissioners, ignorant of all these phenomena, which are now thoroughly established, thought that all which they had observed might be explained by three chief causes—imitation, imagination, and contact. This is the conclusion of their report:— “ The commissioners have ascertained that the animal magnetic fluid is not perceptible by any of the senses; that it has no action, either on themselves or on the patients subjected to it. They are convinced that