Bully for Brontosaurus

by Stephen Jay Gould

  It didn’t take the Commissioners long to recognize that this fluid escapes all sensation. It is not at all luminous and visible like electricity [the reference, of course, is to lightning before the days of “invisible” flow through modern wires]. Its action is not clearly evident, as the attraction of a magnet. It has no taste, no odor. It works without sound, and surrounds or penetrates you without warning you of its presence. If it exists in us and around us, it does so in an absolutely insensible manner. [All quotations from the commissioners’ report are my translations from an original copy in Harvard’s Houghton Library.]

  The commissioners therefore recognized that they would have to test for the existence of animal magnetism through its effects, not its physical properties. This procedure suggested a focus either on cures or on the immediate (and dramatic) crises supposedly provoked by the flow of magnetism during Mesmer’s sessions. The commissioners rejected a test of cures for three obvious and excellent reasons: Cures take too long and time was awasting as the mesmeric craze spread; cures can be caused by many factors, and the supposed effects of magnetism could not be separated from other reasons for recovery; nature, left to her own devices, relieves many ills without any human intervention. (Franklin wryly suspected that an unintended boost to nature lay at the root of Mesmer’s successes. His fluid didn’t exist, and his sessions produced no physical effect. But patients in his care stayed away from conventional physicians and therefore didn’t take the ordinary pills and potions that undoubtedly did more harm than good and impeded natural recovery.) Mesmer, on the other hand, wanted to focus upon cures, and he refused to cooperate with the commission when they would not take his advice. The commission therefore worked in close collaboration with Mesmer’s chief disciple, Charles Deslon, who attended the tests and attempted to magnetize objects and people. (Deslon’s cooperation indicates that the chief mesmerists were not frauds, but misguided believers in their own system. Mesmer tried to dissociate himself from the commission’s findings, arguing that Deslon was a blunderer unable to control the magnetic flux—but all to no avail, and the entire movement suffered from the exposé.)

  The commissioners began by trying to magnetize themselves. Once a week, and then for three days in a row (to test a claim that such concentrated time boosted the efficiency of magnetism), they sat for two and a half hours around Deslon’s baquet in his Paris curing room, faithfully following all the mesmeric rituals. Nobody felt a thing beyond boredom and discomfort. (I am, somehow, greatly taken by the image of these enormously talented and intensely skeptical men sitting around a baquet, presumably under their perukes, joined by a rope, each holding an iron rod, and “making from time to time,” to quote Lavoisier, “the chain of thumbs.” I can picture the scene, as Lavoisier says—Okay boys, ready? One, two, squeeze those thumbs now.)

  The commissioners recognized that their own failure scarcely settled the issue, for none was seriously ill (despite Franklin’s gout), and Mesmer’s technique might only work on sick people with magnetic blockages. Moreover, they acknowledged that their own skepticism might be impeding a receptive state of mind. They therefore tested seven “common” people with assorted complaints and then, in a procedure tied to the social assumptions of the ancien régime, seven sufferers from the upper classes, reasoning that people of higher status would be less subject, by their refinement and general superiority, to the power of suggestion. The results supported power of suggestion as the cause of crises, rather than physical effects of a fluid. Only five of fourteen subjects noted any results, and only three—all from the lower classes—experienced anything severe enough to label as a crisis. “Those who belong to a more elevated class, endowed with more light, and more capable of recognizing their sensations, experienced nothing.” Interestingly, two commoners who felt nothing—a child and a young retarded woman—might be judged less subject to the power of suggestion, but not less able to experience the flow of a fluid, if it existed.

  These preliminaries brought the commissioners to the crux of their experiments. They had proceeded by progressive elimination and concentration on a key remaining issue. They had hoped to test for physical evidence of the fluid itself, but could not and chose instead to concentrate on its supposed effects. They had decided that immediate reactions rather than long-term cures must form the focus of experiments. They had tried the standard techniques on themselves, without result. They had given mesmerists the benefit of all doubt by using the same methods on people with illnesses and inclined to accept the mesmeric system—still without positive results. The investigation now came down to a single question, admirably suited for experimental resolution: The undoubted crises that mesmerists could induce might be caused by one of two factors (or perhaps both)—the psychological power of suggestion or the physical action of a fluid.

  The experimental method demands that the two possible causes be separated in controlled situations. People must be subjected to the power of suggestion but not magnetized, and then magnetized but not subject to suggestion. These separations demanded a bit of honorable duplicity from the commissioners—for they needed to tell people that nonmagnetized objects were really full of mesmeric fluid (suggestion without physical cause), and then magnetize people without letting them know (physical cause without suggestion).

  In a clever series of experiments, designed mainly by Lavoisier and carried out at Franklin’s home in Passy, the commissioners made the necessary separations and achieved a result as clear as any in the history of debunking: Crises are caused by suggestion; not a shred of evidence exists for any fluid, and animal magnetism, as a physical force, must be firmly rejected.

  For the separation of suggestion from magnetism, Franklin asked Deslon to magnetize one of five trees in his garden. A young man, certified by Deslon as particularly sensitive to magnetism, was led to embrace each tree in turn, but not told about the smoking gun. He reported increasing strength of magnetization in each successive tree and finally fell unconscious in a classic mesmeric crisis before the fourth tree. Only the fifth, however, had been magnetized by Deslon! Mesmerists rejected the result, arguing that all trees have some natural magnetization anyway, and that Deslon’s presence in the garden might have enhanced the effect. But Lavoisier replied scornfully:

  But then, a person sensitive to magnetization would not be able to chance a walk in a garden without the risk of suffering convulsions, and such an assertion is therefore denied by ordinary, everyday experience.

  Nevertheless, the commissioners persisted with several other experiments, all leading to the same conclusion—that suggestion without magnetism could easily produce full-scale mesmeric crises. They blindfolded a woman and told her that Deslon was in the room, filling her with magnetism. He was nowhere near, but the woman had a classic crisis. They then tested the patient without a blindfold, telling her that Deslon was in the next room directing the fluid at her. He was not, but she had a crisis. In both cases, the woman was not magnetized or even touched, but her crises were intense.

  Lavoisier conducted another experiment at his home in the Arsenal (where he worked as Commissioner of Gunpowder, having helped America’s revolution with materiel, as much as Lafayette had aided with men). Several porcelain cups were filled with water, one supposedly strongly magnetized. A particularly sensitive woman who, in anticipation, had already experienced a crisis in Lavoisier’s antechamber, received each cup in turn. She began to quiver after touching the second cup and fell into a full crisis upon receiving the fourth. When she recovered and asked for a cup of water, the foxy Lavoisier finally passed her the magnetized liquid. This time, she not only held, but actually imbibed, although “she drank tranquilly and said that she felt relieved.”

  The commissioners then proceeded to the reverse test of magnetizing without unleashing the power of suggestion. They removed the door between two rooms at Franklin’s home and replaced it with a paper partition (offering no bar at all, according to Deslon, to the flow of mesmeric fluid). They induced a yo
ung seamstress, a woman with particularly acute sensitivity to magnetism, to sit next to the partition. From the other side, but unknown to the seamstress, an adept magnetizer tried for half an hour to fill her with fluid and induce a crisis, but “during all this time, Miss B…made gay conversation; asked about her health, she freely answered that she felt very well.” Yet, when the magnetizer entered the room, and his presence became known (while acting from an equal or greater distance), the seamstress began to convulse after three minutes and fell into a full crisis in twelve minutes.

  The evident finding, after so many conclusive experiments—that no evidence exists for Mesmer’s fluid and that all noted effects may be attributed to the power of imagination—seems almost anticlimactic, and the commissioners offered their result with clarity and brevity: “The practice of magnetization is the art of increasing the imagination by degrees.” Lavoisier then ended the report with a brilliant analysis of the reasons for such frequent vogues of irrationalism throughout human history. He cited two major causes, or predisposing factors of the human mind and heart. First, our brains just don’t seem to be well equipped for reasoning by probability. Fads find their most fertile ground in subjects, like the curing of disease, that require a separation of many potential causes and an assessment of probability in judging the value of a result:

  The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success of charlatans, sorcerers, and alchemists—and all those who abuse public credulity—is founded on errors in this type of calculation.

  I would alter only Lavoisier’s patrician assumption that ordinary folks cannot master this mode of reasoning—and write instead that most people surely can but, thanks to poor education and lack of encouragement from general culture, do not. The end result is the same—riches for Las Vegas and disappointment for Pete Rose. But at least the modern view does not condemn us to a permanent and inevitable status as saps, dupes, and dunces.

  Second, whatever our powers of abstract reasoning, we are also prisoners of our hopes. So long as life remains disappointing and cruel for so many people, we shall be prey to irrationalisms that promise relief. Lavoisier regarded his countrymen as more sophisticated than previous suckers of centuries past, but still victims of increasingly sly manipulators (nothing has changed today, as the Gellers and von Danikens remain one step ahead of their ever-gullible disciples):

  This theory [mesmerism] is presented today with the more imposing apparatus [I presume that Lavoisier means both ideas and contraptions] necessary in our more enlightened century—but it is no less false. Man seizes, abandons, but then commits again the errors that flatter him.

  Since hope is an ever-present temptress in a world of woe, mesmerism “attracts people by the two hopes that touch them the most: that of knowing the future and that of prolonging their days.”

  Lavoisier then drew an apt parallel between the communal crises of mesmeric sessions and the mass emotionalism so often exploited by demagogues and conquerors throughout history—“l’enthousiasme du courage” (enthusiasm of courage) or “l’unité d’ivresse” (unity of intoxication). Generals elicit this behavior by sounding drums and playing bugles; promoters by hiring a claque to begin and direct the applause after performances; demagogues by manipulating the mob.

  Lavoisier’s social theory offered no solution to the destructive force of irrationalism beyond a firm and continuing hegemony of the educated elite. (As my one criticism of the commissioners’ report, Lavoisier and colleagues could see absolutely nothing salutary, in any conceivable form, in the strong emotionalism of a mesmeric crisis. They did not doubt the power of the psyche to cure, but as sons of the Enlightenment, children of the Age of Reason, they proclaimed that only a state of calm and cheerfulness could convey any emotional benefit to the afflicted. In this restriction, they missed an important theme of human complexity and failed to grasp the potential healing effect of many phenomena that call upon the wilder emotions—from speaking in tongues to catharsis in theatrical performance to aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis. In this sense, some Freudians view Mesmer as a worthy precursor with a key insight into human nature. I hesitate to confer such status upon a man who attained great wealth from something close to quackery—but I see the point.)

  I envision no easy solution either, but I adopt a less pessimistic attitude than Lavoisier. Human nature is flexible enough to avert the baleful effects of intoxicated unity, and history shows that revolutionary enthusiasm need not devolve into hatred and mass murder. Consider Franklin and Lavoisier one last time. Our revolution remained in the rational hands of numerous Franklins, Jeffersons, and Washingtons; France descended from the Declaration of the Rights of Man into the Reign of Terror. (I do recognize the different situations, particularly the greater debt of hatred, based on longer and deeper oppression, necessarily discharged by the new rulers of France. Still, no inevitability attended the excesses fanned by mass emotionalism.) In other words:

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Lost his head

  Benjamin Franklin

  Died in bed.

  From which, I think, we can only conclude that Mr. Franklin understood a thing or two when he remarked, speaking of his fellow patriots, but extended here to all devotees of reason, that we must either hang together or hang separately.

  5 | Art and Science

  13 | Madame Jeanette

  THIRTY YEARS AGO, on April 30, 1958, to be exact, I sat with 250 students facing one of the most formidable men of our generation—Peter J. Wilhousky, director of music in the New York City schools and conductor of the New York All-City High School Chorus. As the warm, and primarily parental, applause receded at the concert’s end, Wilhousky returned to the podium of Carnegie Hall, gestured for silence, and raised his baton to conduct the traditional encore, “Madame Jeanette.” Halfway through, he turned and, without missing a beat (to invoke a cliché in its appropriate, literal sense), smiled to acknowledge the chorus alumni who stood at their seats or surrounded the podium, singing with their current counterparts. These former members seemed so ancient to me—though none had passed forty, for the chorus itself was then only twenty years old—and their solidarity moved me to a rare fit of tears at a time when teenage boys did not cry in public.

  “Madame Jeanette” is a dangerous little piece, for it ventures so near the edge of cloying sentimentality. It tells the tale, in close four-part a cappella harmony, of a French widow who sits at her door by day and at her window by night. There she thinks only of her husband, killed so many years before on the battlefield of St. Pierre, and dreams of the day that they will be reunited at the cemetery of Père Lachaise. With 250 teenagers and sloppy conducting, “Madame Jeanette” becomes a maudlin and embarrassing tearfest. Wilhousky, ever the perfectionist, ever the rationalist, somehow steered to the right side of musicality, and ended each concert with integrity and control.

  “Madame Jeanette” was our symbol of continuity. For a very insecure boy, singing second bass on the brink of manhood, “Madame Jeanette” offered another wonderful solace. It ends, for the basses, on a low D-flat, just about as far down the scale as any composer would dare ask a singer to venture. Yes, I knew even then that low did not mean masculine, or capable, or mature, or virile—but that fundament resonated with hope and possibility, even in pianissimo.

  Len and I met at the bus stop every Saturday morning at 7:30, took the Q17 to 169th Street and the subway to Lexington Avenue, walked uptown along the line of the old Third Avenue El, and arrived at Julia Richman High School just in time for the 9 A.M. rehearsal.

  We lived, thirty years ago, in an age of readier obedience, but I still marvel at the discipline that Wilhousky could maintain with his mixture of awe (inspired) and terror (promulgated). He forged our group o
f blacks from Harlem, Puerto Ricans from the great migration then in progress, Jews from Queens, and Italians from Staten Island into a responsive singing machine. He worked, in part, through intimidation by public ridicule. One day, he stopped the rehearsal and pointed to the tenor section, saying: “You, third row, fourth seat, stand up. You’re singing flat. Ten years ago, Julius La Rosa sat in that same seat—and sang flat. And he’s still singing flat.” (Memory is a curious trickster. La Rosa, in a recent New Yorker profile, states that Wilhousky praised him in the same forum for singing so true to pitch. But I know what I heard. Or is the joke on me?) Each year, he cashiered a member or two for talking or giggling—in public, and with no hope of mercy or reinstatement.

  But Peter Wilhousky had another side that inspired us all and conveyed the most important lesson of intellectual life. He was one of the finest choral conductors in America, yet he chose to spend every Saturday morning with high school kids. His only rule, tacit but pervasive, proclaimed: “No compromises.” We could sing, with proper training and practice, as well as any group in America—nothing else would be tolerated or even conceptualized. Anything less would not be worth doing at all. I had encountered friendliness, grace, kindness, animation, clarity, and dedication among my teachers, but I had never even considered the notion that unqualified excellence could emerge from anything touched or made by students. The idea, however, is infectious. As I worked with Wilhousky, I slowly personalized the dream that excellence in one activity might be extended to become the pattern, or at least the goal, of an actual life.