"Mesmerism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to very good authorities, there is grave doubt as to whether the so-called condition is a sleep at all. Hypnotism is at any rate a suspension of the faculties, resembling sleep, caused by the will and act of the operator. He effects this by fixing the eyes on the patient, making passes as in Mesmerism, giving a glass of water, or simply commanding sleep. And this, as Dr. COCKE has experienced and described, can be produced to a degree by anyone on himself. But as I have verified by experiment, if we, after retiring to ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... good deal of skepticism as to extraordinary influence. To talk of an overpowering mind rouses the same jealousy and defiance which one may observe round a table where anybody is recounting the marvellous anecdotes of mesmerism. Each auditor puts a final stroke to the discourse by exclaiming, "Can he mesmerize me?" So each man inquires if any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... the same as the old mesmerism, and mesmerism was widely acknowledged as clairvoyance, and all that harmonizes again with the experiences of the mediums whose subconscious mind in trance enters into contact with the spirits of the ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... again," says the Adjutant. "Another string loose in the bag. Strategy in one respect resembles mesmerism—the object operated upon must remain perfectly quiet. Are we never to suppose that the Rebels have plans, and that their vigilance increases, and will increase, in proportion to the extremity of their case? Our theorists and routine men move armies as ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... this important work was accomplished, the party retired. Mr. Presby was a philosopher, and his library had not been a merely ornamental appendage of his house. He had read a great deal, and thought a great deal; and mesmerism, biology, psychology, somnambulism, and kindred subjects, had each in its turn been considered, and ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... the doctors are all against hydropathy, and mesmerism, and the magnetic telegraph, and everything that is new; so we thought it best ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... Johnson wished to have a word to say upon the bill. As the present Congress had done much to encourage science, he did not wish to see the science of mesmerism neglected and overlooked. He therefore proposed that one half of the appropriation be given to Mr. Fisk, to enable him to carry on experiments, as well as ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... of shaded eyes half closed, watched the oncoming squadrons in a staring mesmerism. His only movement was a tattoo of the fingers on ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... sometimes chides, sometimes soothes, and sometimes threatens, and at last says to the spirit, "If you do not go out quietly, I will confine you by my sacred power." By such means the spirit is exorcised; the process resembles mesmerism in some points, but of course has no sensible foundation. In other cases the spirits of those who have either recently, or even years before, met with cruel wrongs or death, may in their wanderings seize upon some person in the vicinity, though totally unconnected with the crime done upon them, ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... think of it, the whole theory seems absurd. It is unscientific. It is not even a case of mesmerism. If he had said that he hypnotised his victims, the matter would assume a totally different aspect. I admit that something is wrong somewhere, and that the home of Reginald Clarke is no healthful abode for me. But you must also ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... survives to-day in out-of-the-way places. Holgrave, the young daguerreotypist in "The House of the Seven Gables," a type of the universal Yankee, had practised a number of these queer trades: had been a strolling dentist, a lecturer on mesmerism, a salesman in a village store, a district schoolmaster, editor of a country newspaper; and "had subsequently travelled New England and the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut manufactory of Cologne water and other essences." The Note Books tell ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... hand soothed the woman. Clara felt the eyelids close under her palm; but a heavy pulse was beating in the temples, which resisted all her gentle mesmerism for a long time; but, after a while, the worn frame seemed to rest, and Clara sank down in weary sleepiness by ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... crazy, or all my studies in diseases of the mind have done me no good. Your story hangs together as no fiction could. To believe you, brands us both as lunatics. Come on and let's see what your mesmerist frauds have to say. As a specialist in facts, I'm a drowning man catching at a straw. Come on: mesmerism, or astrology, or Moqui snake-dance, it's all ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... Sabbath subjects, treated in the style in which they generally are by professed teachers.' A more questionable diligence displayed itself in the zealous practice of experiments in animal magnetism and mesmerism. With a faith that might have moved mountains the two brothers laid their hands upon all sorts of sick folk, and they believed themselves to have wrought many cures and wonders. William Greg described animal magnetism as a 'discovery bearing more ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... been doing all this before any society for psychical research had founded itself and the intention of new logic was to be scientific rather than psychological. They had written books, scattered through the years, on mesmerism, hypnosis, abnormal mental conditions, the powers of suggestion, even unexplored dimensions ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... folks keep the people in ignorance, and make them believe the moon is made of green cheese; others, with as much sense, fancy the world is. One has old saints, the other invents new ones. One places miracles at a distance, t'other makes them before their eyes, while both are up to mesmerism. One says there is no marryin' in Paradise, the other says, if that's true, it's hard, and it is best to be a mormon and to have polygamy here. Then there is a third party who says, neither of you speak sense, it is better to believe nothin' than to give yourself up to be crammed. Religion, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... touch, voice, and look. The fascination by touch was simply mesmerism, or rather the biology of the present day, in an undeveloped stage. There were said to be four qualities of touch,—calidus, humidus, frigidus, et siccus, or hot, cold, moist, and dry,—according to which persons were active or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... That the spasms which from time to time attacked him were extremely serious, is abundantly proved by the testimony of those who lived with him at this period, and by his own letters. Some relief was obtained by mesmerism, a remedy suggested by Medwin; but the obstinacy of the torment preyed upon his spirits to such an extent, that even during the last months of his life we find him begging Trelawny to procure him prussic acid as a final and effectual remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... There were other peculiarities of habit and power. When she turned her head on one side, she alleged she had second sight, like St. Francis. These traits or predispositions made her a willing listener to all the uncertain science of mesmerism and its goblin brood, which have been ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the Mormons, and the Shakers, some of which believed in trances and miracles, others in the quick coming of Christ, and still others in the reorganization of society; and the pseudo-sciences, like mesmerism and phrenology, had numerous followers. The ferment has long since subsided, and much that was then seething has since gone off in vapor; but when all that was spurious has been rejected, we find that the general impulse was but ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... sumptuous apartment, which he opened to all comers who chose to make trial of the new power of nature. M. D'Eslon, a physician of great reputation, became a convert; and from that time, animal magnetism, or, as some called it, mesmerism, became the fashion in Paris. The women were quite enthusiastic about it, and their admiring tattle wafted its fame through every grade of society. Mesmer was the rage; and high and low, rich and poor, credulous and unbelieving, all hastened ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Bible from end to end. But the word "Spiritualism" has been so befouled by wicked charlatans, and so cheapened by many a sad incident, that one could almost wish that some such term as "psychic religion" would clear the subject of old prejudices, just as mesmerism, after many years of obloquy, was rapidly accepted when its name was changed to hypnotism. On the other hand, one remembers the sturdy pioneers who have fought under this banner, and who were prepared to risk their careers, their professional ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... supposing even that there is no imposture, there must be a human being like ourselves, by whom, or through whom, the effects presented to human beings are produced. It is so with the now familiar phenomena of mesmerism or electro-biology; the mind of the person operated on is affected through a material living agent. Nor, supposing it true that a mesmerised patient can respond to the will or passes of a mesmeriser a hundred miles distant, is the response less occasioned by a material being; it may be through ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... Mr. Pound has always professed strong admiration (see "Mesmerism" in "Personae"); there are traces of him in "Cino" and "Famam Librosque Cano," in the same volume. But it is more profitable to comment upon the variety of metres and the original ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... has been said to have at all times the same want—namely, of one sane man, with adequate powers of expression to hold up each object of monomania in its right relations. 'The ambitious and mercenary bring their last new Mumbo-Jumbo—whether tariff, railway, mesmerism, or California—and by detaching the object from its relations, easily succeed in making it seen in a glare, and a multitude go mad about it; and they are not to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... that I know nothing about mesmerism, but I have seen strange effects produced quite unconsciously by the presence of one person upon another. And in a few minutes after Herbert took his seat beside Traverse, it was noticeable that the face of the sleeper lost its ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... on her head and shoulders and breast, it cascaded down her limbs, soothing as the hand of mesmerism, refreshing, delightful beyond words, then she came back into the cave and, finding the cotton waste, dried herself as well as she could, dried her hair and twisted it into a knot, put on her blouse, coat and skirt and ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... efficacious to extend the hand with its outspread fingers towards the suspected person. It is considered an evil omen to meet a monk on first going out for the day. The evil eye may be classified with the phenomena of mesmerism. The Italians, especially the Neapolitans, very generally wear amulets. Pio Nono, perhaps as being the chief of all monks and other religious people, is supposed to have an evil eye of tenfold malignancy; and its effect has been seen in the ruin of all schemes ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as before; but she cares not a fig for any deities, Christian or pagan—and don't believe a word of the immortality of the soul! In this new book, of which she is the chief author, the interlocutors place implicit credence in all the phenomena of mesmerism, and they cannot believe there is any thing in man's being or existence or conscience beyond what the senses reach, beyond what the scalpel discloses in the brain. They trace acts and motions and even inclinations to the brain, and deny that there is or can be any thing in contact ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... that disinclined to believe in the occult sciences. I dinna haud a'thegither wi' Salverte. There was mair in them than Magia naturalis, I'm thinking. Mesmerism and magic-lanterns, benj and opium, winna explain all facts, Alton, laddie. Dootless they were an unco' barbaric an' empiric method o' expressing the gran' truth o' man's mastery ower matter. But the interpenetration o' the spiritual ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... into the beautiful home of the sisterhood. They bathe in the golden fountains of youth, and are instructed in various ways. They are taught the uses of magnetism, mesmerism, and psychology, and return to earth to rap, write, and speak, through media, and to bring back the stray lambs ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... by this time well known. Before the war we took little notice of it. We sometimes saw it stated in print, but it seemed to us too monstrous and inhuman to be the creed of a whole people. We were wrong; it was the creed of a whole people. By the mesmerism of State education, by the discipline of universal military service, by the pride of the German people in their past victories, and by the fears natural to a nation that finds enemies on all its fronts, an absolute belief in the State, in war as the highest activity of ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... mesmerism," explained the other. "I'll try you for a subject. If you'll stand up, feet apart, eyes closed, I'll hypnotize you so that you'll fall over ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... I believe everything and every body. The more extraordinary the narrative, the more faith am I inclined to place in it. Trevor, there, as we all know," added he, laughingly, "has a twist. He's a 'total abstinence' man—a homeopathic man—a Benthamite, and secretly favors Mesmerism. With such abounding faith upon some points, we will allow him to be somewhat skeptical upon others. Come, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... up all your Mesmerism and a trifle more in my new book," said du Maurier to me, some time before he published his "Trilby"; and that remark started us talking of the good old times in Antwerp, and overhauling the numerous drawings and sketches in which he so vividly depicted the incidents of our ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... know if the effect of her supposed sorcery could be attributed to mesmerism. The document in my possession appears to be original, as Jone Coward's signature is in a different hand to that ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... the writers. His success was not partial, it was complete. There was not simply a preponderance of evidence, it was beyond a doubt. The directors did not question the fact; but how was it done? Some thought mesmerism could account for it, and others ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... the House by a majority of six. Trembling with anxiety, Morse sat in the gallery of the House while the vote was taken and listened to the irreverent badinage of Congressmen as they discussed his bill. One member proposed an amendment to set aside half the amount for experiments in mesmerism, another suggested that the Millerites should have a part of the money, and so on; however, they passed the bill. And that night Morse wrote: ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... of Minoret obtained during the lively debates to which mesmerism gave rise a certain celebrity which occasionally recalled him to the minds of his relatives, still the Revolution was so great a destroyer of family relations that in 1813 Nemours knew little of Doctor Minoret, who was induced to think of returning there to die, like ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... letters!) had been repelled by the blunt strength of Jane Eyre; just as it would not have been wonderful if they had held aloof from Miss Martineau, in the days when it pleased that remarkable woman to preach mesmeric atheism, or atheistic mesmerism, as we choose to put it. But there was a lifelong friendship between them and Harriet Martineau; and they recognized at once the sincerity and truth—the literary rank, in fact—of Jane Eyre. Not long after her marriage, Jane Forster with her husband ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... training, argued Bartram to himself: the feeblest and most excitable intellects, the world over, were the first to be impressed by whatever seemed supernatural, whether it were called religion, spiritualism, mesmerism, or anything else. It was merely a matter of mental excitement: the stronger the attack, the sooner the relapse. Sam Kimper would lose faith in his fancies sooner or later; it might be somewhat cruel to hasten this result, but what was a little more or ...
— All He Knew - A Story • John Habberton
... lest the moral balance should topple headlong after the intellectual, and the downward course of vanity, excitement, deception, blasphemous assumptions be entered on. Happy for her that she was in Protestant and common-sense England, and in a country parish, where mesmerism and spirit-rapping were unknown. Had she been an American, she might have become one of the most lucrative "mediums;" had she been born in a Romish country, she would have probably become an even more famous personage. There is no reason why she should not have ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... I could feel his eyes on me, and had I turned, I should probably had found M. S. glaring at me in honest hate. These men were students of mesmerism, of spiritualism, and my commonplace ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... unaccountable, absurd, disgusting, degrading. His nervous sensibilities are shocked by an account of the fearful pangs accompanying the stigmata. In the phenomena of ecstasy he can see nothing more than the ravings of delirium, or (if he believes in mesmerism) than the tales of a clairvoyante, and the rigidity of catalepsy. His physical frame, accustomed to its routine of breakfast, luncheon, and dinner, its sofas and easy-chairs, and its luxurious bed, shudders at the thought of the self-inflicted penances of the ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... originated the patent-medicine almanac, along with other advertising innovations. The patent-medicine business, however, represented merely one of his wide-ranging interests; he was also a co-owner of vessels plying the Great Lakes, a publisher, and a dabbler in such occult arts as Mesmerism, Phrenology, and Morse's theory of the electric telegraph. In 1855 he appeared as the proprietor of the Daily Republic, and it was perhaps his growing involvement in publishing that led him to turn his drug business ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... to the wishes of the skipper, wishes which approximated closely to those of Royalty in their effects, they remained on board. A new acquaintance of his, a brother captain, who dabbled in mesmerism, was coming to give them a taste of his quality, and the skipper, sitting on the side of the schooner in the faint light which streamed from the galley, was condescendingly explaining to them the marvels ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... demonomy^, demonship^; diablerie [Fr.], bedevilment; witchcraft, witchery; glamor; fetishism, fetichism, feticism^; ghost dance, hoodoo; obi, obiism^; voodoo, voodooism; Shamanism (Esquimaux), vampirism; conjuration; bewitchery, exorcism, enchantment, mysticism, second sight, mesmerism, animal magnetism; od force, odylic force^; electrobiology^, clairvoyance; spiritualism, spirit rapping, table turning. divination &c (prediction) 511; sortilege^, ordeal, sortes Virgilianae^; hocus-pocus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... looking deeply into her eyes, holding them as he could when he liked, in spite of her efforts to turn them away—a mesmerism ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... Commerce again recommended an appropriation of 30,000 dollars in aid of the telegraph. Morse had come to be regarded as a tiresome 'crank' by some of the Congressmen, and they objected that if the magnetic telegraph were endowed, mesmerism or any other 'ism' might have a claim on the Treasury. The Bill passed the House by a slender majority of six votes, given orally, some of the representatives fearing that their support of the measure would alienate their constituents. Its fate in the Senate was even more dubious; and when ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... pernicious effects of socialism. A dozen new theories were afloat. Constant had committed suicide by Esoteric Buddhism, as witness his devotion to Mme. Blavatsky, or he had been murdered by his Mahatma, or victimized by Hypnotism, Mesmerism, Somnambulism, and other weird abstractions. Grodman's great point was—Jessie Dymond must be produced, dead or alive. The electric current scoured the civilized world in search of her. What wonder if the shrewder sort divined that the indomitable ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... grew faint and dizzy, and we went Out on the cool moonlighted portico, And, sitting there, Roy drew my languid head Upon the shelter of his breast, and bent His smiling eyes upon me, as he said: "I'll try the mesmerism of my touch To work a cure: be very quiet now, And let me make some passes o'er your brow. Why, how it throbs! you've exercised too much! I shall not let you dance ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... grave good men—men of intellect and influence—with all the advantages of modern science, learning, experience; men who would regard Anselm with sad and serious pity; yet tell us stories, as having fallen within their own experience, of the marvels of mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is ridiculous) as this of the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... view of the nature of insanity receives support, I think, from the phenomena of Hypnotism which, about forty years ago, attracted, under the name of Mesmerism, so much attention in England in consequence of the proceedings of Dr. Elliotson in the hospital and college where we meet to-day. This was in 1838, and Braid's attention was arrested by what he witnessed in 1841. It is no ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... don't think I see the streets and the lights, Or hear the answers my questions brought; Yet something guides me, and guides me aright— Is mesmerism the nonsense I thought? If the brain, engross'd by a single fact, Fails the whole army of nerves to sustain, The outposts perhaps, refusing to act, Transmit neither sight nor sound to ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... attempting to explain, only to suggest a conceivable hypothesis. Upon such constitutions, it would not be surprising that certain other constitutions, similar, yet differing, should exercise a peculiar influence. You are, I dare say, more or less familiar with the main features of mesmerism and its allies, among which is what is called biology. I presume it is on such constitutions as I have supposed, that those powers are chiefly operative. Miss Cameron has, at some time or other in her history, submitted herself to the influences of this ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... thenceward ad libitum; the tramp, suppositiously stealing a ride, found dead on the railroad; the grand jury returning a sensational indictment against a bar-tender non est; the Temperance outbreak; the "Revival;" the Church Festival; and the "Free Lectures on Phrenology, and Marvels of Mesmerism," at the town hall. It was during the time of the last-mentioned sensation, and directly through this scientific investigation, that I came upon two of the town's most remarkable characters. And however meager my outline of them may prove, ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... that when I was a boy Dr. Spurzheim came to this country to advocate phrenology, but everybody held up both hands—"Phrenology! You must be running mad to have the idea that phrenology can be true!" It was not long after that, mesmerism came along; and then the people said, "Mesmerism! We can go phrenology; there is some sense in that; but as for mesmerism—!" Very soon spiritualism made its appearance, and then the same people began to say, "Spiritualism! Why it is nothing ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the beast in the Apocalypse; and still others in the reorganization of society and {436} of the family on a different basis. New systems of education were tried, suggested by the writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, and others. The pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phrenology, as taught by Gall and Spurzheim, had numerous followers. In medicine, homeopathy, hydropathy, and what Dr. Holmes calls "kindred delusions," made many disciples. Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham and other vegetarians, abjured ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... vines on it or with nothing on it, though it (the tune) be made by a genius whose power of objective contemplation is in the highest state of development? Can it be done by anything short of an act of mesmerism on the part of the composer or an act of kindness on the part of the listener? Does the extreme materializing of music appeal strongly to anyone except to those without a sense of humor—or rather with a sense ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... separation of soul and body. As soon as the senses become torpid, the inner man withdraws from the outer. There are three different ways which afford this separation. First, natural sleep. Second, induced sleep, such as hypnotism, mesmerism or trance. Third, death. In the above two cases the man has only left his physical body temporarily, whereas in death he has left it forever. In the case of death, the link which unites soul and body, ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... goin's on outside the lodge an' in, while fire-eyes would show an' burn an' glower up in the peak of the teepee; an' all plenty skeary an' mystifiyin'. Besides these yere accomplishments the Lance is one of them mesmerism sports who can set anamiles to dreamin'. He could call a coyote or a fox, or even so fitful an' nervous a prop'sition as a antelope; an' little by little, snuffin' an' snortin', or if it's a coyote, whinin', them beasts would approach the Lance ontil they're that clost he'd tickle their ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... taint of "modernism." The portals of her mind were well guarded against the entrance of radical thought, and her dreamers were yet lulled into lethargic adherence to outworn beliefs and musty creeds by the mesmerism of priestly tradition. The peculiar cast of mind of the boy Jose was not the product of influences from without, but was rather an exemplification of the human mind's reversion to type, wherein the narrow and bigoted mentality ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... singular parallel to the performance of the African wizard must be quoted from a curious pamphlet already referred to, a translation of the old French 'Verge de Jacob,' written, annotated, and published by a Mr. Thomas Welton. Mr. Welton seems to have been a believer in mesmerism, animal magnetism, and similar doctrines, but the coincidence of his story with that of the African sorcerer is none the less remarkable. It is a coincidence which must almost certainly be 'undesigned.' Mr. Welton's wife was what modern occult ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... has consented to it. Now, Mrs. Michelson, I know I can depend on you, and I want you to keep a sharp eye on the nurse for the first day or two, and to see that she gives Miss Halcombe no medicines but mine. This foreign nobleman of yours is dying to try his quack remedies (mesmerism included) on my patient, and a nurse who is brought here by his wife may be a little too willing to help him. You understand? Very well, then, we may go upstairs. Is the nurse there? I'll say a word to her before ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... and the encouraging accents of his voice greeted the invalid. I can remember now, as if it were yesterday, how the touch of his hand—he had a most sympathetic touch—was almost too much sometimes, the help and hope in it making my heart full to overflowing. He believed firmly in the power of mesmerism, as a remedy in some forms of illness, and was himself a mesmerist of no mean order; I know of many cases, my own among the number, in which he used his power in ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... hushed expectancy on every side—could feel the eyes of many women fixed on him—and began to draw on his guard as a fighting man draws on armor. There and then he deliberately set himself to resist mesmerism, which is the East's ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... seal, seems to indicate a revival of those teachings and manifestations at the present time. Within a few years, the curiosity of the community has been excited, and large numbers of persons greatly interested, in various phenomena, known as Mesmerism, Animal-Magnetism, Clairvoyance, Pathetism, Neurology, Psychology, Biology, Electro-Biology, &c. &c. Similar manifestations have been before exhibited, but not in modern times to the extent now witnessed. These were regarded ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... invisible to their eyes—and, I repeat, in that marvel they find the source of a new interest in the purpose that unites them. I only notice this as offering a curious view of human character, which must be quite new to you. We have nothing whatever to do with clairvoyance, or with mesmerism, or with anything else that is hard of belief to a practical man, in the inquiry that we are now pursuing. My object in following the Indian plot, step by step, is to trace results back, by rational means, to natural causes. Have I succeeded ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... appreciated, and she chatted blythely and freshly with all—her spontaneous laugh bearing testimony to her enjoyment—while The Dreamer yielded himself with his wonted modesty and grace to the hour—answering questions as to whether he really did believe in ghosts and whether the experiments in mesmerism in his story, "The Case of M. Valdemar" had any foundation in fact, with his captivating but enigmatic smile, and a little ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... the old Salem witchcraft, and not a few considered it direct dealing with the Evil One. Ben was deeply interested. He and Joe talked over clairvoyance and mesmerism,—a curious power developed by a learned German, Dr. Mesmer, akin to that of some of the old magicians. Ben was very fond of abnormal things; but Joe set down communication with another world as an impossibility. Still, a ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... agency, the facts are interesting as furnishing a new line of inquiry, by showing that, in this instance at least—and if in this, why not in others?—the phenomena of spiritualism were closely allied to those of clairvoyance and mesmerism, and that the path of investigation into all these mysteries may be pursued by one and the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... Radcliffe romance up to date; terror in Ainsworth's other novels; Marryat's Phantom Ship; Bulwer Lytton's interest in the occult; Zanoni, and Lytton's theory of the Intelligences; The Haunted and the Haunters; A Strange Story and Lytton's preoccupation with mesmerism. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are now almost universally admitted. Of these latter, those who doubt, are your mere doubters by profession—an unprofitable and disreputable tribe. There can be no more absolute waste of time than the attempt to prove, at the present day, that man, by mere exercise of will, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
