With reference to the rumor current in his later years that his views were unchanged, Quimby writes in 1862, “As I used to mesmerise, some think my mode of treatment is mesmeric. But my mode is not in the least like those who claim to be mesmerised, or to be spiritual mediums.” Adding that he knows all about mesmeric treatment, after “twenty years” since he began the experiments which enabled him to see through it, he says that if he “had no other aim than dollars and cents,” he would close his eyes, go into a trance, tell the patient how he felt and call some Indian to prescribe by making out the patient “sick of scrofula or of cancerous humor or some other foolish disease,” and impress upon the patient the necessity of having medicine ordered by the spirits of his “own getting up.” That is, he sees through the whole game played by mesmerists and mediums who mislead the people and take their money. “If I should do this, I should do what I know to be wrong.” Instead, he tells his readers that he asks “no aid from any source but Wisdom. . . . Wisdom never acts in that way.”
Again, in October, 1861, Quimby writes: “It is twenty years since I first embarked in what was one of the greatest humbugs of the age, mesmerism. At that time the people were as superstitious about it as they were two hundred years ago in regard to witchcraft.”
What was the prime result of his investigations? That the human mind is amenable to suggestion, as we now say; that there are subjects capable of being put into a state which we now call hypnosis; and that the alleged magnetic, electrical or mesmeric effects are not mysterious at all, but are the results of the action of mind on mind. The alleged humbug was reduced to the operation of a principle to which we are all subject, the influence of thought. The supposed wonders of the clairvoyant state are capital instances of the activity of an intuition which we all possess. There is no such process as “mesmerism,” therefore. There is no “magnetic healing.” There is power of one mind to control another, to be sure, and this was surely remarkable in the case of Quimby and Lucius. But the clairvoyant or intuitive powers of Lucius were not generated in Lucius by Quimby: these are latent powers of the human soul, and all minds have access to things, persons and events at a distance. All healing said to take place by mesmeric, spiritistic or magnetic in-
