Mesmerism, or System of Interactions

and because, moreover, people neither heeded Mesmer’s view of nature—which he had immediately made public in its basic features through print at the time he announced magnetism as a newly discovered healing agent and which should have served as a guide for judgment—nor understood its deep meaning due to the aforementioned prejudice and a kind of blindness, it was the easiest and most convenient path to deny the existence of such a discovered natural force and the very facts that attested to it. They did this under all sorts of pretexts, whether by nitpicking or by outright rejection, and they dismissed the basic features of Mesmer’s view of nature as mere daydreaming.

This is how it happened first in the fatherland, in Germany, and later in France in a modified way, among the so-called scholars and men of the profession. Individual exceptions among them did exist, and some were truly excellent, but they were swept away in the current of misunderstanding and resistance. The notorious report of the Parisian Commission on magnetism, designed with a hypocritical calm and the appearance of cool examination—though all the more poisonous for it—also struck a crushing blow to German physicists and psychologists, indeed to scholars of all classes, and increased