One Simple Idea (3 page)

The next generation of Idealist philosophers, most significantly Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, also saw reality as a product of man’s perceptive faculties—but our senses, they argued, were limited in their ability to perceive the true nature of things. The mind was finally experiencing itself, Kant and Hegel reasoned, and not ultimate reality. Like Berkeley, Kant and Hegel also believed, more or less, in a fixed nature or set of universal laws, within which an awakened person could serve as an extraordinary actor but not as an agent of creation.

Some mid- to late-nineteenth-century modernists, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, extolled the powers of human will and spoke of an inner-self that formed an invisible seat of power.
But, again, such views did not elevate the mind as the author of reality. Indeed, all of the major Idealist philosophers and their offspring, from Kant to Emerson to Nietzsche, held that natural man could
ally
himself with universal forces, and thus attain a kind of greatness or at least a right way of living, but none broke with Berkeley’s assertion that the shapes and shades of reality “are not creatures of my will.”

A countercurrent of sorts emerged in the eighteenth-century writings of Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg’s vast and challenging cosmic philosophy depicted the presence of God as a “Divine influx”—an animating body of energies and ideas—that permeated all of nature, including the mind. Swedenborg’s “Divine influx” echoed aspects of ancient Hermetic thought. In turn, the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson took partial influence from Swedenborg’s ideas. In a vastly more engaging manner than the Swedish mystic, Emerson, starting in the 1830s, depicted the mind as a capillary of divine influence, and he described human thought as a kind of concentrically expanding awareness, ultimately capable of godlike perception. Emerson extolled the power of ideas to shape a person’s life, noting in his 1841 essay “Spiritual Laws” that “the ancestor of every action is a thought.” Emerson saw the touch of divine power in an active, sensitive human mind.

All of these ideas presented tantalizing possibilities to liberal religious thinkers. Yet even by the mid-nineteenth century, the notion of an empirically empowering mysticism, one that could create and shape circumstance, was unheard-of within either reformist or mainstream congregations—and certainly not within Calvinist Protestantism and Catholicism. The modern West possessed no concept that our thoughts, much less a healthful sense of self-worth, could influence or reorder outer events.

It was only deep within subcultures of religious experimentation that the positive-thinking ideal actually began to take shape—and in settings far removed from universities, seminaries, or philosophical societies.

In the 1830s, a handful of New Englanders, some raised in America and others transplanted from England and France, started to probe the inner workings of the mind. The New England experimenters, in a period before modern psychological language, gave birth to a set of hypotheses about the effects of thoughts and emotions on health, and about the power of a deeply held idea to alter behavior or outer events.

A dramatic turn in how the Western world came to view the mind played out in Maine in 1833. This development hinged upon the experience of a simple and extremely influential man: a New England clockmaker named Phineas P. Quimby. That year, quietly and with little forethought, Quimby embarked on a psychological experiment that formed the germination of the positive-thinking outlook.

A man in his early thirties, Quimby was suffering from tuberculosis. Under doctor’s orders he had been ingesting calomel, a popular though disastrous therapy in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a mercury-based toxin that induced massive salivating and foaming of the mouth. Calomel was a common treatment among physicians who practiced “heroic medicine.” The theoretical framework behind heroic medicine was that the draining of bodily fluids could rid a patient of disease and serve as an overall tonic to health. The champion of this approach was physician Benjamin Rush, a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Rush was broadminded in matters of religion. He was among the few friends in whom Jefferson confided his own heterodox religious views, including his disbelief in Biblical miracles. But Rush’s medical ideas, which dominated the American scene for generations, were medieval.

Along with calomel ingestion, Rush prescribed bleeding or bloodletting, a protocol embraced by other American doctors, who added a variety of measures to drain bodily fluids, such as open or “weeping”
wounds, the ingestion of toxins and narcotics to produce profuse sweating, and—almost unbelievable in the modern era—the application of bloodsucking leeches. Rush viewed illness not as something to be healed but to be combated. “Always treat nature in a sick room as you would a noisy dog or cat,” he told students, “drive her out at the door and lock it upon her.” This was the reality facing Quimby and most American patients in the first half of the nineteenth century.

By the early 1830s, the ingestion of calomel was causing Quimby to suffer from mercury poisoning. The side effects were disfiguring. “I had taken so much calomel,” he later wrote in his journals, “that my system was said to be poisoned with it; I lost many of my teeth from that effect.” He continued, “In this state I was compelled to abandon my business and, losing all hope, I gave up to die.” At this time Quimby and his wife, Susannah, had two sons and an infant daughter. How they managed to support a family during Quimby’s illness is a trial of which he makes no mention.

With little left to lose, Quimby turned to a therapeutic procedure recommended by a friend: horseback riding. “Having an acquaintance who cured himself by riding horseback,” he recalled, “I thought I would try riding in a carriage as I was too weak to ride horseback.” In actuality, Quimby was reprising a treatment known to the ancient Greeks, who used vigorous horseback riding as a tonic. One day Quimby set off in his carriage in the countryside outside Belfast, Maine. He had a “contrary” horse, which kept stopping and finally would not budge unless the clockmaker ran beside him. Exhausted from running the horse up a hill, Quimby collapsed into the carriage and sat stranded two miles from home. He managed to call to a man plowing a nearby field and asked him to come and start the horse. “He did so,” Quimby continued,

Quimby grew intrigued at how the frenetic carriage ride seemed to lift his symptoms of tuberculosis. As his spirits rose, he noticed, so did his bodily vigor. The carriage ride formed Quimby’s earliest notions that the mind had an effect on the body. But it would take the experience of an occult philosophy called Mesmerism, which was then reaching America from Paris, to make Quimby ponder the full possibilities. Mesmerism, the work of self-styled eighteenth-century Viennese healer Franz Anton Mesmer, ignited a new range of hypotheses about the human mind.

Born in 1734, Franz Anton Mesmer was a German-speaking physician of the late Enlightenment era. In the 1770s, Mesmer theorized that all of life was shot through with an invisible ethereal fluid, which he called
animal magnetism
. If this vital fluid was out of alignment, Mesmer reasoned, illness resulted. He claimed to correct the flow of animal magnetism by placing a patient into a trance state, or a
magnetized
condition. Mesmer induced trances by making a series of hand and eye gestures, or “passes,” around a subject’s face and head. Once a subject was entranced, his vital energies, Mesmer believed, could be realigned. Most notably, Mesmer also discovered that trance subjects were receptive and malleable to his commands.

This is the practice that was redubbed “hypnotism” in the early 1840s by Scottish physician James Braid. Braid considered it a mental process and not an occult manipulation of unseen energies. Indeed, Mesmer himself did not perceive his method as an occult healing, but as a practice in league with Enlightenment-age principles.

Mesmer attained his greatest public acclaim, and notoriety, in 1778 after moving to Paris, a place already roiling with intrigues and tensions in the years preceding the French Revolution. Mesmer conducted public
séances
, or sittings, where he would attempt to heal patients in a dramatic group atmosphere. During Mesmer’s séances, people suffering from maladies ranging from consumption to joint pain to melancholia were seated, hands linked, around a wooden tub, or
baquet
, containing iron rods and fillings, which had been specially “magnetized” to realign a subject’s vital energies. During séances, patients were expected to experience convulsions and fainting—which Mesmer dubbed “crises”—as a signal that their bodily magnetism was responding to treatment.

While Mesmer acknowledged that his treatments depended upon sympathies between the patient and Mesmerist (someone who practiced his art), he rarely probed the matter further. “There is only one illness and one healing,” Mesmer wrote, steadfastly insisting on the existence of an invisible fluidic flow. The eighteenth-century healer possessed neither a vocabulary nor the background to pursue questions about mind-body healing and subliminal states. The question of mental suggestion went unasked.

Many advocates of social reform in France took a deep interest in Mesmerism. To these enthusiasts, the susceptibility of all people, from peasants to noblemen, to enter a Mesmeric trance validated the ideal of an innate equality within human beings. Indeed, in France of the late eighteenth century, every advance in science or industry took on political overtones. To Mesmer’s supporters, efforts to discredit Mesmerism amounted to the ploy of entrenched aristocratic interests, such as the French Academy of Sciences, to suppress a medical practice that was outside their purview and that could be used to aid common people.

Benjamin Franklin, who was then serving as America’s ambassador to France, considered Mesmer a dangerous fraud and questioned whether sexual liberties were taken while subjects were entranced. In March 1784, King Louis XVI asked Franklin to chair a royal committee
to investigate Mesmer’s methods. The Franklin commission, composed of members of the French Academy of Sciences and the Paris Faculty of Medicine, conducted a series of trials to test the healer’s theories.

Franklin’s shaky health kept the elder statesman from witnessing most of the trials firsthand. And Mesmer himself had departed Paris in the lead-up to the investigation. One of Mesmer’s students, the physician Charles d’Eslon, consented to work with the commission, though somewhat contentiously. The Franklin committee encompassed luminaries, such as chemist Antoine Lavoisier, astronomer Jean Bailly, and physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (whose name was later applied to the most dreaded device of the French Revolution). In trials, the investigators discovered that magnetic treatments could move patients to convulsions, or Mesmer’s “crises,” and other kinds of violent bodily effects, from coughing blood, to temporarily losing the power of speech, to sensations of heat or cold, and, in a few limited cases, to claims of comfort or cure.

The panelists noted that many patients, when blindfolded, could be induced to convulsions if they merely
thought
they were being subjected to Mesmeric methods. Hence, the royal panelists concluded in August 1784 that Mesmer’s “cures” were all in the imagination, induced either by the charisma of the healer or by the copycat effect of convulsions that occurred en masse in séances. In their report to the king, the Franklin commission members wrote that their “decisive experiments” had proved “that the imagination alone produces all the effects attributed to magnetism; & when the imagination does not act, there are no more effects.”

Left unaddressed by commission members was the question of why the subject’s imagination should produce any results at all. Content to dispel notions of etheric magnetism, commission members left dangling what may have been their most significant observation. Regardless, the panel’s conclusions irreversibly sullied Mesmer’s reputation. He never again resided in Paris. Mesmer eventually returned to the German-speaking Swiss region where he was born and lived out a mostly quiet existence, corresponding with supporters and seeing patients until his death in 1815.

Until the end of his life, Mesmer stood by his theories of etheric fluid. Yet the healer’s protégés edged away from questions of animal magnetism. They adopted a more psychological language. One of the most gifted of them, the Marquis de Puységur, undertook experiments in late 1784 and early 1785 that persuaded him that the suggestive powers of the Mesmerist, and his “rapport” with the patient, was the agency behind the reported cures.

“Animal magnetism,” Puységur wrote, “lies not in the action of one body upon another, but in the action of thought upon the vital principle of the body.” In terms Mesmer would not use, the student made the connection between mind and body.

Puységur fashioned a terminology that was remarkably anticipatory of the tone found in later generations of motivational psychology. When Puységur was dispatched to take command of a French artillery regiment in Strasbourg in August 1785, he began teaching classes in Mesmerism to a local Freemasonic lodge. At the end of the course, the Mesmerist gave his students an affirmation that extolled the forces of the mind: