Mesmerism appears, and professes to have discovered _another influence_ by which the nervous system is peculiarly affected; in other words, it merely adds a new influence to the number of those which were universally acknowledged before, it matters little whether it be the Magnetism of Mesmer, or the Odyle of Reichenbach, or the Dia-magnetism of Faraday.

But how could this discovery, even supposing it to be fully established, affect the state of the question respecting the radical distinction between Mind and Matter?
If we were Immaterialists before, while we acknowledged the influence of the atmosphere, of light, of heat, and of electricity, may we not be Immaterialists still, notwithstanding the addition of Odyle to the class of _dynamides_?
May we not admit the stranger, with the strange name, if suitably attested, without the slightest apprehension of thereby weakening the grounds on which we hold Mind to be essentially different from Matter, and incapable of being identified with it?
It were a foolish and dangerous expedient, and one to which no enlightened advocate of Immaterialism will have recourse, to denounce the professed discoveries either of Phrenology or of Mesmerism, on the ground of their supposed tendency to obliterate the distinction between Mind and Matter.

For the fact, that certain "organs" exist, by means of which the mind acquires a large portion of its knowledge, and that certain "influences" are known to affect it from without, is too well established to be called in question; and the mere extension of that fact by the discovery of _other organs and other influences_, hitherto unknown, could have no tendency to shut us up, more than before, to the adoption of the theory of Materialism.

It is the part of wisdom, then, to leave ample scope and verge for the progress of Physiological research in this as in every other department, and to rest in the confident persuasion that whatever discoveries may yet be made in regard to the _connection_ between mind and body, they can have no effect in disproving a _radical distinction_ between the two.

And this we deem a much safer ground than that which Professor Gregory has adopted, when he first of all denies the possibility of defining either matter or spirit, and then leaves the existence of "a thinking principle or soul distinct from the body" to rest merely on "our instinctive consciousness."[158] We think it, in every point of view, a safer course to meet all objections by saying, that the admission of the _odylic_ or any other influence of a similar kind, would not in the least affect the grounds of our belief in the existence of an immaterial mind.
We are disposed to pursue the same line of argument a step further, and to apply it to the case of "Hypnotism" or "Clairvoyance." It had always been known that the mind, in its present state of connection with the body, is liable to be affected by _sleep_ and by _dreams_; and the phenomena of natural sleep and of ordinary dreams were never supposed to be incompatible with the distinction between mind and body.