As has been said, there are two lines of development growing out of Mesmer and his methods. Ten years after Mesmer left Paris Alexandre Bertrand pointed out that after the elimination of errors due to fraud or mal-observation, the results which Mesmer and his associates had produced were due not to animal magnetism, but to expectation induced by suggestion and intensified by the peculiar setting which Mesmer had contrived for his so-called treatments. The schools of medicine were slow to follow out Bertrand's discovery and it was not until something like twenty years later, through the studies of Braid, that hypnotism began to be taken seriously. But once the matter was brought broadly before them, the doctors began to follow it through. Charcot, in the Salpetriere, used hypnotic suggestion for the correction of abnormal mental and nervous states. The psychologists took up the matter and hypnotic suggestion has come to be not only a legitimate subject for the investigation of the student and an accepted method in correction of abnormal mental states, but as it were a window through which we are beginning to see deeply into unsuspected depths and intricacies of personality. Modern faith healing cults, however, have not come to us down this line, though the studies of Bertrand, Braid, Charcot, Du Bois and their associates supply the interpretative principles for any real understanding of them. Mesmerism naturally appealed to the type of mind most easily attracted by the bizarre and the mysterious. There are always amongst us the credulous and curious who find little enough either to awe or inspire them in the broad sweep of law, or in such facts as lie open to the light of reason. Such as these are impatient of discipline, eager to free themselves from the sequence of cause and effect; they are impressed by the occult powers and seek short cuts to health, or goodness, or wisdom. They delight to build up, out of their own inner consciousness, systems which have little contact with reality and which, through their very tenuousness, are as incapable of disproof as through their disengagement from normal experience they are capable of verification. They are the people of what the alienist calls the "idee fixe." Everything for them centers about one idea; they have one key and one only to the marvellous complexity of life. Such a temper as this naturally disassociates them from reality and makes them contemptuous of contradictory experiences. _Mesmerism is Carried to America; Phineas Quimby an Important Link in a Long Chain_