On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature · Arthur Schopenhauer
ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND MAGIC.
In 1818, when my chief work first appeared, Animal Magnetism had only begun to struggle into existence. But, as to its explanation--although, to be sure, some light had been thrown upon the passive side of it, that is, upon what goes on within the patient, by the contrast between the cerebral and the ganglionic systems, to which Reil had drawn attention, having been taken for the principle of explanation--the active side, the agent proper by means of which the magnetiser evokes all these phenomena, was still completely shrouded in darkness. People groped about among all sorts of material principles of explanation, such as Mesmer's all-permeating ether, or the exhalations from the magnetiser's skin, assumed by Stieglitz to be the cause, &c. &c. At the utmost a nerve-spirit had been recognised and, after all, this was but a word for an unknown thing. The truth had scarcely begun to dawn upon a few persons, whom practice had more deeply initiated. But I was still far from hoping for any direct corroboration of my doctrine from Magnetism. _Dies diem docet_ however, and the great teacher, experience, has since brought to light an important fact concerning this deep-reaching agent which, proceeding from the magnetiser, produces effects apparently so contrary to the regular course of Nature that the long lasting doubt as to their existence, the stiff-necked incredulity, the condemnation of a Committee of which Lavoisier and Franklin were members, in short, the whole opposition that Magnetism encountered both in its first and second period (with the sole exception of the coarse, unintelligent condemnation without inquiry, which till very lately, prevailed in England) is quite excusable. The fact I allude to is, that this agent is nothing but the _will_ of the magnetiser.
To-day not a doubt exists on this point, I believe, among those who combine practice with insight; therefore I think it superfluous to quote the numerous assertions of magnetisers in corroboration of it.[284] Time has thus not only verified Puységur's watchword and that of the older French magnetisers: "_Veuillez et croyez!_" _i.e._ "Will with belief!" but this very watchword has even developed into a correct insight of the process itself.[285] From Kieser's "Tellurismus," still probably the most thorough and detailed text book of Animal Magnetism we have, it clearly results, that no act of Magnetism can take effect without the will; on the other hand the bare will, without any outward action, is able to produce every magnetic effect. Manipulation seems to be only a means of fixing, and so to say incorporating, the will and its direction. In this sense Kieser says: "Inasmuch as the human hand--being the organ by which Man's outward activity is most visibly expressed--is the efficient organ in magnetising, manipulation arises."
De Lausanne, a French magnetiser, pronounces himself with still greater precision on this point in the Fourth Book of his "Annales du Magnétisme Animal" (1814-1816), where he says: "_L'action du magnétisme dépend de la seule volonté, il est vrai; mais l'homme ayant une forme_ extérieure et sensible, _tout ce qui est à son usage, tout ce qui doit agir sur lui, doit nécéssairement en avoir une, et pour que la volonté agisse, il faut qu'elle employe un mode d'action._" As, according to my doctrine, the organism is but the mere phenomenon, the visibility, the objectivity of the will; nay, as it is properly speaking only the will itself, viewed as representation in the brain: so also does the outward act of manipulation coincide with the inward act of the will. But where magnetic effects are produced without manipulation, they take place as it were artificially, in a roundabout way, the imagination taking the place of the outer act and even occasionally that of personal presence: wherefore it is much more difficult and succeeds less frequently.
Kieser accordingly alleges that the word "Sleep!" or "You must!" said aloud, has a more powerful effect upon a somnambulist than the mere inward willing of the magnetiser.--On the other hand manipulation, and in general outward action, is really an infallible means of fixing the magnetiser's will and promoting its activity; precisely because outward acts are quite impossible apart from all will, the body and its organs being nothing but the visibility of the will itself. This explains the fact, that magnetisers at times magnetise without any conscious effort of volition and almost without thinking, and yet produce the desired effect. On the whole, it is not the consciousness of volition, reflection upon it, that acts magnetically, but pure volition itself, as detached as possible from all representation. In Kieser's directions to magnetisers therefore,[286] we find all thinking and reflecting upon their respective doing and suffering, all conversation between them, forbidden both to physician and patient; also all outward impressions which arouse representations, the presence of strangers, and even daylight. He advises that everything should proceed as unconsciously as possible, as is likewise recommended in charm-cures.
The true reason of all this is, that here the will operates in its primariness, as thing in itself; and this demands the exclusion, as far as possible, of representation, as a different sphere, as secondary to the will. Facts to prove that the real agent in magnetising is the will and each outward act only its vehicle, may be found in all the more recent and more trustworthy writings upon Magnetism, and it would be needless prolixity to repeat them here. Nevertheless I will quote _one_ case, not as being especially striking, but as furnished by a remarkable person and having a peculiar interest as his testimony. Jean Paul says in a letter:[287] "Twice in a large company I have made Frau von K. nearly go to sleep by merely looking at her with a _firm will_, no one else knowing anything about it, and before that, I had brought on palpitation of the heart and pallor to such a degree that Dr. S. had to be summoned to her assistance."[288] Nowadays too, merely laying and keeping hold of the patient's hands while fixing the eye steadily upon him, is frequently substituted with complete success for the customary manipulation; precisely because even this outward act is suited to fix the will in a determined direction. But this immediate power which the will can exercise over other persons, is brought to light best of all by the admirable experiments made, even in public, by M. Dupotet and his pupils in Paris, in which a stranger is guided and determined at pleasure by the magnetiser's mere will, aided by a few gestures, and is even forced into the most extraordinary contortions. An apparently quite honestly written pamphlet, entitled "First glance into the wonder-world of Magnetism," by Karl Scholl (1853), contains a brief account of this.
He next placed her against a column and charmed her to the spot, so that she was unable to move in spite of the strongest efforts.--_According to my own observation_, nearly all his feats are to be explained by his _isolating the brain from the spinal marrow_, either completely, in which case the sensible and motor nerves become paralyzed, and total catalepsy ensues; or partially, by the paralysis only affecting the _motor_ nerves while sensibility remains--in other words, the head keeps its consciousness, while the body is apparently lifeless. This is precisely the effect of strychnine: it paralyzes the motor nerves only, even to complete _tetanos_, which induces death by _asphyxia_; but it leaves the sensible nerves, and with them consciousness, intact. Regazzoni does this same thing by the magic influence of his will. The moment at which this isolation takes place is distinctly visible in a peculiar trembling of the patient. I recommend a small French publication entitled "Antoine Regazzoni de Bergame à Francfort sur Mein," by L. A. V. Dubourg (Frankfurt, Nov. 1854, 31 pages in 8vo.) on Regazzoni's feats and the unmistakeably genuine character they bear for everyone who is not entirely devoid of all sense for organic Nature. In the "Journal du Magnétisme," edit. Dupotet, of the 15th August, 1856, in criticizing a treatise: "De la Catalepsie, mémoire couronné," 1856, in 4to, the reviewer, Morin, says: "La plupart des caractères qui distinguent la catalepsie, peuvent être obtenus artificiellement et sans danger sur les sujets magnétiques, et c'est même là une des expériences les plus ordinaires des séances magnétiques." [Add. to 3rd ed.]
In the "Communications concerning the somnambulist, Auguste K. in Dresden" (1843), we find the truth in question confirmed in another way by what the somnambulist herself says, p. 53: "I was half asleep and my brother wished to play a piece he knew. As I did not like it, I requested him not to play it; nevertheless he tried to do so and then, by means of my firm will that he should not, I succeeded in making him unable to remember the piece, in spite of all his endeavours."--The thing is however brought to a climax when this immediate power of the will is extended even to inanimate bodies. However incredible this may appear, we have nevertheless two accounts of it coming from entirely different quarters. In the book just mentioned,[289] it is related and testified by witnesses, that Auguste K. caused the needle of the compass to deviate at one time 7° and at another 4°, this experiment moreover being repeated four times. She did this moreover without any use of her hands, through her mere will, by looking steadily at it.--The Parisian somnambulist, Prudence Bernard, again in a public _séance_ in London, at which Mr. Brewster, the physicist's son and two other gentlemen from among the spectators acted as jurors, made the compass needle deviate and follow her movements by simply turning her head round.[290]
The eighteenth century makes an exception as regards this belief in Magic, and this is mainly because Balthasar Becker, Thomasius and some others, with the good intention of putting an end once for all to the cruel trials for witchcraft, declared all magic to be impossible. Favoured by the philosophy of the age, this opinion soon gained the upper hand, although only among the learned and educated classes. The common people have never ceased to believe in witchcraft, even in England; though here the educated classes contrive to unite a degrading religious bigotry with the firm incredulity of a Saint Thomas (or of a Thomasius) as to all facts transcending the laws of impact and counter-impact, acids and alkalis, and refuse to lend an ear to their great countryman, when he tells them that 'there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.' One branch of Magic is still notoriously preserved and practised among the lower orders, being tolerated on account of its beneficent purpose. This is _curing by charms_ (_sympathetische Kuren_, as they are called in German), the reality of which can hardly be doubted.
Charming away warts, is one of the commonest forms of this practice, and of this Bacon of Verulam, cautious and empirical though he was, attests the efficacy from personal experience.[296] The charming away of erisypelas in the face by a spell, is another instance, and so often succeeds, that it is easy to convince oneself of its existence. Fever too is often successfully combated by spells, &c. &c.[297]--That, in all this, the real agents are not the meaningless words and ceremonies, but that it is the will of the operator which acts, as in Animal Magnetism, needs no further explanation after what has been said above. For such as are still unacquainted with charm-cures, instances may be found in Kieser.[298]--These two facts therefore, Animal Magnetism and Charm-curing, bear empirical evidence to the possibility of magical, as opposed to physical, influence, which possibility had been so peremptorily rejected by the past century; since it refused to recognise as possible any other than physical influences brought about in the way of the intelligible nexus of causality. [294] Plin. hist. nat. L. 30, c. 3. [Add. to 3rd ed.] [295] Apuleius, "Oratio de Magia," p. 104. Bip. [296] Bacon, "Silva Silvarum," § 997. [297] In the "Times" of June the 12th, 1855, we find, p. 10, the following:-- "A Horse-charmer.
"On the voyage to England the ship 'Simla' experienced some heavy weather in the Bay of Biscay, in which the horses suffered severely, and some, including a charger of General Scarlett, became unmanageable. A valuable mare was so very bad, that a pistol was got ready to shoot her and to end her misery; when a Russian officer recommended a Cossak prisoner to be sent for, as he was a 'juggler' and could, by charms, cure any malady in a horse. He was sent for, and immediately said he could cure it at once. He was closely watched, but the only thing they could observe him do was to take his sash off and tie a knot in it three several times. However the mare, in a few minutes, got on her feet and began to eat heartily, and rapidly recovered." [Add. to 3rd ed.] [298] Kieser, "Archiv, für den thierischen Magnetismus," vol. v. heft 3, p. 106; vol. viii. heft 3, p. 145; vol. ix. heft 2, p. 172; and vol. ix. heft 1, p. 128; Dr. Most's book likewise: "Über Sympathetische Mittel und Kuren," 1842, may be used as an introduction to this matter. (And even Pliny indicates a number of charm-cures in the 28th Book, chaps. 6 to 17. [Add. to 3rd ed.])
It is a fortunate circumstance, that the rectification of this view in our time should have come from medical science; because it ensures us at the same time against the danger of the pendulum of opinion receiving too strong an impulse in the contrary direction, and thus carrying us back to the superstition of ruder ages. Besides, as I have said, Animal Magnetism and Charm-curing only save the reality of a part of Magic, which included a good deal more, a considerable portion of which must, for the present at least, remain under the old sentence of condemnation or be left in uncertainty; whereas another portion will at any rate have to be conceived as possible, through its analogy to Animal Magnetism. For Animal Magnetism and Charm-cures are but salutary influences exercised for curative purposes, like those recorded in the "History of Magic" as practised by the so-called (Spanish) _Saludadores_,[299] who nevertheless were also condemned by the Church; whereas Magic was far oftener practised with an evil intent. Nevertheless, to judge by analogy, it is more than probable, that the same inherent force which, by acting directly upon another individuality, can exercise a salutary influence, will be at least as powerful to exercise a prejudicial and pernicious one.
If therefore there was reality in any part of ancient Magic beyond what may be referred to Animal Magnetism and curing by charms, it must assuredly have been in that which is called _maleficium_ and _fascinatio_, the very thing that gave rise to most of the trials for witchcraft. In Most's book, too, already mentioned,[300] a few facts are related which must undoubtedly be ascribed to _maleficium_; in Kieser,[301] also we find instances of diseases which had been transmitted, especially to dogs, who died of them. In Plutarch[302] we find that _fascinatio_ was already known to Democritus, who tried to explain it as a fact. Now admitting these stories to be true, they give us the key to the crime of witchcraft, the zealous persecution of which would therefore not have been quite without reason. For even if in most cases it may have been founded upon error and abuse, we are still not authorized to look upon our forefathers as having been so utterly benighted, as to persecute with the utmost vigour and cruelty for so many ages an absolutely impossible crime.
From this point of view moreover, we can also understand that the common people should still even to the present day persist in attributing certain cases of illness to a _maleficium_, and are not to be dissuaded from this conviction. Now if we are thus induced by the progress of the age to modify the extreme view adopted by the last century concerning the absolute nullity of this ill-famed art--at any rate with respect to some part of it--still nowhere is caution more necessary than here, in order to fish out from the chaos of fraud, falsehood and absurdity contained in the writings of Agrippa von Nettesheim, Wierus, Bodinus, Delrio, Bindsfeldt, &c. &c., the few isolated truths that may lie in them. For, frequent though they may be throughout the world, nowhere have lies and deceit freer play than where Nature's laws are avowedly set aside, nay declared invalid. Here therefore we find the wildest fictions, the strangest freaks of the imagination worked up into an edifice, lofty as the skies, on the narrow foundation of the slight particle of truth there may have been in Magic, and in consequence of this, the most sanguinary atrocities perpetrated age after age. In contemplating such things, the psychological reflection on the unlimited capability of the human intellect for accepting the most incredible absurdities and the readiness of the human heart to set its seal to them by cruelty, prevails over every other.
If our natural mode of knowing were one that handed over to us things in themselves immediately and consequently gave us the absolutely true relations and connections of things, we might then, no doubt, be justified in rejecting _à priori_, therefore unconditionally, all prescience of future events, all apparitions of absent, of dying, let alone of deceased persons, and all magical influence. But if all that we know is, as Kant teaches, mere phenomenon, the forms and laws of which do not extend to things in themselves, it must be obviously premature to reject all foreknowledge, all apparitions and all magic; since that rejection is based upon laws, whose _à priori_ character precisely restricts them to phenomena; whereas things in themselves, to which even our own inner self must belong, remain untouched by them. But it is quite possible for these very things in themselves to have relations with us from which the above-mentioned occurrences may have arisen, concerning which accordingly we have to wait for the decision _à posteriori_, and must not forestall it.
That the English and French should persist in denying _à priori_ all such occurrences, comes at the bottom from the influence of Locke's philosophy, under which these nations still stand as to all essential points, and by which we are taught that, after merely subtracting sensation, we know things in themselves. According to this view therefore, the laws of the material world are held to be ultimate, and no other influence than _influxus physicus_ is admitted. Consequently these nations believe, it is true, in a physical, but not in a metaphysical, science, and therefore reject all other than so-called "Natural Magic:" a term which contains the same _contradictio in adjecto_ as "Supernatural Physics," but is nevertheless constantly used quite seriously, while the latter was used but once, and then in joke, by Lichtenberg. On the other hand, the common people, with their universal readiness to give credit to supernatural influences, express by it in their own way the conviction, that all things which we perceive and comprehend are mere phenomena, not things in themselves; although, with them, conviction is only felt.
I quote the following passage from Kant's "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten," as a proof that this is not saying too much: "There is an observation requiring no great subtlety of reflection, which we may on the contrary suppose the most ordinary understanding capable of making, albeit in its own way and by an obscure distinction of the faculty of judgment, which it calls feeling. It is this: that all our involuntary representations (such as those of the senses) give us no further knowledge of objects than as they affect us, whereby we are left in ignorance as to what those objects may be in themselves; that, as far as this sort of representation is concerned therefore, we are still only able by this means to attain knowledge of phenomena, but never of _things in themselves_, even by dint of the utmost clearness and the most strenuous attention the understanding is able to give to this point. When once this distinction is made, however, it stands to reason, that the existence of something else behind these phenomena, something which is not phenomenon, _i.e._ the thing in itself, has still to be admitted and assumed."[303] [303] Kant, "First Principles of Ethical Metaphysic," 3rd edition, p. 105.
"Der Gott der mir im Busen wohnt, Kann tief mein Innerstes erregen, Der über allen meinen Kräften thront, Er kann nach Aussen nichts bewegen." According to the fundamental thought just expounded, we find that the physical medium used in all attempts at magic, never was regarded in any other light than in that of a vehicle for a thing metaphysical; otherwise it could evidently stand in no relation whatever to the effect contemplated. These media consisted in cabalistic words, symbolical actions, traced figures, wax images, &c. &c. We see too that, according to the original feeling, what this vehicle conveyed, was in the last resort always an act of _volition_ that had been connected with it. The very natural inducement to do this, was the observation, that every moment men became aware of a completely unaccountable, that is, evidently metaphysical, agency of the will, in the movements of their own bodies. Might not this agency, they thought, be extended to other bodies also? To find out a way to annul the isolation in which the will finds itself in each individual, and to extend the immediate sphere of the will's action beyond the organism of the person willing, was the aim of Magic.
A great deal was nevertheless still wanting ere this fundamental thought, from which Magic seems properly to have sprung, could pass over at once into distinct consciousness and be recognised _in abstracto_, and ere Magic could at once understand itself. Only a few thoughtful and learned writers of former ages--as I mean soon to prove by quotations--express the distinct thought, that it is in _the will_ itself that the magic power lies, and that the strange signs and acts together with the senseless words that accompanied them, which passed for the means of exorcising and the connecting link with demons, are in fact merely vehicles and means for fixing _the will_, by which the act of volition, which is to act magically, ceases to be mere wish and becomes deed, or, to use the language of Paracelsus, "receives a _corpus_," and the individual will in a sense distinctly proclaims that it is now acting as general will, as will in itself. For in every act of Magic--charm-cure or whatever else it may be--the outward action (the connecting link) is exactly what the passes are in magnetising: _i.e._ not what is really essential, but the mere vehicle, that by which the will, the only real agent, is directed and fixed in the material world and enters into reality.
As a rule therefore, it is indispensable.--From the rest of the writers of those times we gather that, in conformity with that fundamental thought of Magic, their only aim was to obtain absolute, arbitrary power over Nature. But they were unable to elevate themselves to the thought that this power must be a _direct_ one; they conceived it, on the contrary, absolutely as an _indirect_ one. For all religions in all countries had placed Nature under the dominion of gods and of demons. Now, it was the magician's endeavour to subject these gods and demons to his will, to induce, nay, to force them to serve him; and he attributed all that he succeeded in achieving to their agency, just as Mesmer attributed the success of his Magnetism to the magnetic rods he held in his hands, instead of to his will which was the real agent. It was in this sense that all polytheistic nations took the matter, and even Plotinus,[305] but more especially Iamblichus, understood Magic: that is, as _Theurgy_, an expression which Porphyry was the first to use.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.