I never submitted myself to an experiment of the sort again. I found that in my own case it was quite unnecessary, and that I could do all that the mesmerized could without being thrown into the somnambulic state. I commenced from that time to practise mesmerism myself. I entered upon a course of experiments which carried me much farther than the masters I was acquainted with. I found, that while no machinery for magnetizing was absolutely indispensable, yet passes with the hand were serviceable, and that the tub and rod of Mesmer, which had been discarded, were of great assistance. Metallic balls, properly prepared, and magnetized, and placed in the hand of the person to be affected, as practised by the Electro-Biologists, very much facilitated the process. I was thus brought back to Mesmer, and induced to reject the doctrine of the ultra-spiritualists, who would have it that the effects are produced by the simple will acting on the will of the person to be mesmerized. There was certainly a fluid in the case, whether electric, magnetic, or as the Baron Riechenbach would say, _odic_, and whether it is to be regarded as efficient cause or only as an instrument, as maintained by a recent French author, who seems to have studied the whole subject with rare patience, and yet rarer good sense. CHAPTER VI. TABLE TURNING. The point to which I at first directed my attention was to ascertain the power, which, by means of mesmerism, I might acquire over the elemental forces of nature. I found that with or without actual contact I could at will paralyze the whole body of another, subject it in great measure to my own will, and force it to obey my bidding. I could render it preternaturally weak and preternaturally strong. I found also that I could produce all these effects at a distance, by means of magnetized inanimate objects. For instance, I would magnetize a bunch of flowers, and a person knowing nothing of what I had done, who should take them up and smell of them, would exhibit all the usual phenomena of the mesmerized. Here it was evident that the mesmeric power, whatever it might be, could act directly on matter, and lodge itself in a material object. It was clear then that the mesmeric phenomena had a real objective cause, and therefore could not be the effects either of imagination or hallucination. Here was a most striking and important fact, and one which entirely refuted the ultra spiritualism of the majority of mesmerizers.