I do not give the results of my first experiments as any thing very wonderful. They would excite little attention now. Mesmerism is much more advanced than it was in the hands of my French friend. It is true, there were rumors even then of far more marvellous phenomena, strange stories of clairvoyance or second-sight were whispered, and strange revelations of an invisible world, not recognized by received science, were hinted; but my friend would not heed them. He was a rationalist, and would not hear of any thing not explicable on natural principles. But what I witnessed convinced me of the reality of the magnetic sleep, and of the subjection of the somnambulist to the will of the mesmerizer, or that one person can, under certain circumstances, exercise an absolute control over the organs of another, and render the somnambulist, during the magnetic sleep, absolutely insensible to all save the mesmerizer. Here was certainly a marvellous power; what was it? Was it, as Bailly and Franklin’s Report of 1784 asserted, the imagination? Singular effect of imagination that would put a person asleep at another’s will, render her completely insensible—dead to all the world but the mesmerizer; make her go to sleep and wake up at the time specified, answer questions only mentally put, and with a promptness and an accuracy wholly impossible in her normal state! A very inexplicable imagination that, and itself not less puzzling than the mesmeric phenomena themselves. “No, it is not imagination,” insisted Dr. P——, “any more than it is a magnetic fluid, as asserted by Mesmer. It is the will of the magnetizer operating immediately on the will of the somnambulist, and through that on her organs. Or rather, it is the spiritual being in me operating immediately on the spiritual being in her, and therefore these phenomena afford an excellent refutation of materialism, and reveal a great and glorious law of human nature, recognized, though misconceived, in all ages and nations; a mighty law, but hitherto denied to human nature, and supposed to be something lying out of our sphere, superhuman, and even supernatural. Modern science began by denying the mysterious facts recorded in history, but it is beginning to accept them, and to show that they are all explicable on the principles of human nature.” “What strikes me as most remarkable in the mesmeric phenomena,” said Mr. Winslow, a rather grave minister of the extreme left of the Unitarian denomination, who had joined Dr. P—— and myself on our way to my lodgings, “what strikes me as most remarkable in the mesmeric phenomena is, not the kind of power they reveal, but the degree. Every man who has been accustomed to public speaking, if he has observed, is conscious of a kindred power.” “To put his audience asleep,” interposed Jack Wheatley, a young lawyer, who was usually one of my companions while in the city, “but not always to make them submissive to his will.”