Science with a Soul

Abstract

French

From the 1840s through to the end of his life in 1888, James Freeman Clarke’s influence permeated newspapers, churches, and lecture halls in Boston. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Clarke was an educated and active participant in his community and a respected voice amongst Boston intellectuals. At a time when sciences of the mind were rapidly expanding, Clarke neither ceded authority nor turned a blind eye. Instead, he studied emerging psychologies himself, approaching them as ways to enhance his understanding of the human being—body, soul, and spirit. In his private writings, including journals and letters, Clarke discusses his applications of experimental science, and he appears especially enthusiastic about mesmerism. However, from the pulpit and the lectern, Clarke was almost silent on the topic. This article examines Clarke’s private letters, journals, and sermon notes, accessed in the archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society, for evidence of the role mesmerism played in Clarke’s religious ideology, specifically his concept of man’s physical and spiritual constitution. For Clarke, mesmerism allowed an intimate incorporation of the body with theology, for through it the body became a conduit to the soul and to individual character. Clarke’s interest in and practice of mesmerism reveals it as an underground force that not only shaped his thoughts and theology, but also influenced a number of fellow theologians and intellectuals during the mid-nineteenth century.

Keywords

James Freeman Clarke Margaret Fuller mesmerism animal magnetism Unitarianism transcendentalism

Past, present, and future are thus seen to be beginning, middle, and end. Separate events are no longer casual, they do not fall, like unconnected grains of sand, by a law of gravity; they rise, each to its own place, like the particles in a plant, by a law of growth. The world is at last found to have a soul, and history is also found to have a soul; and when this is seen by science, science becomes vital, it also has a soul. Vital science becomes religious, for the soul of nature and of history is seen to be God. Science having grown vital confutes atheism, for atheism consists in looking at the facts of nature, and omitting to see their soul. (Clarke, 1857: p. 194)

On 23 January 1876, the Boston Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke preached a sermon titled “The Religion of Science,” challenging the recently published History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science by Dr John William Draper. In his book, Draper notes a public departure from religious belief in America and Europe and contends that this departure is indicative of a conflict that may be traced throughout the history of science. He charges practitioners of the faith to support their claims with Reason, for if not held to a standard of evidence, religion would continue its trajectory of conflict with science. Draper’s conflict thesis emerged in part from the ongoing professionalization of science; in America and Europe, science departments were cropping up in colleges across the country and science associations were proliferating. According to historian James Turner (1985: 123), the burgeoning field of science was producing “competitors out to best the clergy in the struggle for public resources and respect.”

While Draper was influential in promoting the conflict thesis, Clarke (1876) expressed to his parishioners at the Church of Disciples in Boston this conviction in “The Religion of Science”:

There is, and can be, no conflict between Science and Religion. Some Theologians may foolishly attack Science, or scientific theories. Some scientists may foolishly attack Religious Convictions or Theological opinions. But Religion, which is the devotion of the soul to Infinite Beauty, Truth & Goodness; can never be at war with Science, which is the knowledge of this same Beauty, Goodness & Truth in the outward Universe…I shall therefore speak not of the “Conflict between Science & Religion”—but of the “Alliance between Science & Religion.”

Clarke’s consciousness of the secularization thesis is clear, and in this sermon he joined fellow clergymen who “chanted loudly, frequently, and nervously throughout the century the harmony of science and religion” (Turner, 1985: 124). Clarke’s “The Religion of Science,” which continues by detailing the complementary components of science and religion, was subsequently printed in the Saturday Evening Gazette. According to Clarke’s notes, he delivered it on three more occasions in 1878: as a baccalaureate sermon to the senior class at Cornell University, again at Tufts College, and finally in the Philadelphia Conference. In this piece, Clarke promotes an alliance between science and religion not merely to defend his own authority and that of fellow ministers. Instead, he articulated a belief that had guided his studies for decades, as he enthusiastically examined new scientific discoveries and synthesized those discoveries with theology.

When Clarke was first starting out in his ministerial career in the 1830s, he had been particularly drawn to the novel “science” of mesmerism, or animal magnetism. From our twenty-first-century perspective, mesmerism appears as a lowbrow popular culture phenomenon with tenuous scientific backing; however, from its principles the esteemed Reverend Clarke educed an intellectual formulation of man’s physical and spiritual natures. James Freeman Clarke was “born and bred in the environment of upper middle class traditionalism and never outgrew the influence of this origin,” but he also actively investigated the popular spectacle of mesmerism (Bolster, 1954: 353). His activity with this pseudoscience, however, has been generally overlooked by scholars.¹ Clarke’s biographer, Arthur S. Bolster, Jr (1954), mentions Clarke’s experiences with phrenology and hydropathy, but not with mesmerism; Christopher G. White (2006) includes Clarke among nineteenth-century Unitarian ministers who sought spiritual assurance in phrenology. A look back at Clarke’s involvement with mesmerism fills in this gap in scholarship and illustrates how a respectable nineteenth-century churchman sought to integrate science with religion, and thereby solidify the foundation of his own belief system. To investigate mesmerism’s role in Clarke’s belief system, we must first recall the role that mesmerism played in nineteenth-century American culture.

According to historian Robert C. Fuller (1982: 43), in 1843 Boston housed more than two hundred magnetizers, or mesmerists. What were all of those mesmerists doing with their “patients,” or mesmeric subjects? In some cases, they were practicing medicine: “literally thousands believed animal magnetism to be the sole agent responsible for their recovery from heart disease, epilepsy, inflamed joints, rheumatism, recurrent headaches, nervous disorders, menstrual aches, and general melancholia” (Fuller, 1982: 30). For shrewd businessmen, mesmeric performances meant easy money: “Quick to capitalize on the latest sensation, enterprising showmen drew large crowds to witness what amounted to little more than stage hypnotism. Mesmerism was for them nothing more than mass entertainment” (Fuller, 1982: 30). For still other mesmerists, the motivation to entrance another individual was sexual. One Boston mesmerist anonymously admitted abusing mesmerized young women, in a pamphlet titled Confessions of a Magnetizer (1845). Quite against his original intentions of healing, the author found that:

Time after time he had been unable to resist the seductive appeal of beautiful women utterly subjecting themselves to him while grasping his hand and gazing trustingly into his eyes. By skillfully employing his mesmeric powers, he had succeeded in stirring their passions toward him to such a degree that they became willing to commit indecencies. (qtd. in Fuller, 1982: 33–34)

Thus, although many mesmerists claimed that the trance tapped into the individual’s innermost being, or soul, the most overt implications regarded the body. Because of its carnal nature and appeal to lowbrow culture, many of the day’s intellectual elite decried the popular phenomenon of mesmerism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1839: 26), for instance, dismissed mesmerists as charlatans in an 1839 lecture entitled “Demonology,” asserting that mesmerism is “separated by celestial diameters from the love of spiritual truths. It is a wholly false view to couple these things in any manner with the religious nature and sentiment.” Emerson championed unique, personal spiritual experiences, but he was distrustful of those who intruded upon another individual’s consciousness through the stagecraft of mesmerism. He warned that “the inquiry is pursued on low principles” and “becomes in such hands a black art” (Emerson, 1965: 388). Likewise, Samuel Chase Coale (1998: 7, 3) has found that, while the psychological principles of mesmerism fascinated and even influenced the “structure and texture” of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels, “from a moral and philosophical perspective, Hawthorne thoroughly despised the pseudosciences of mesmerism and spiritualism that erupted in American culture in the 1840s and 1850s. As Hawthorne saw it, mesmerists or hypnotists, by placing their mediums or subjects in a trance, could demonically possess and control them.” In The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852), in particular, Hawthorne cast his mesmeric characters as demonic deceivers who control and manipulate those around them.

Thomas Hill, a Unitarian clergyman and educator, and a later president of Harvard College, issued the following warning against mesmerism in 1856 in The Christian Examiner:

…the wonderful phenomena of mediumship and clairvoyance are well worthy of study. But as revealed religion forbids us to inquire of a medium or clairvoyant concerning the future or the spirit-world, so humanity seems to us to forbid our inquiry of real mediums for the sake of investigating phenomena. It is putting a fellow-creature into an unnatural and unhealthy state for the gratification of our curiosity. (Hill, 1856: 382)

While many claimed healing and spiritual insight from the mesmeric trance, Hill found it physically intrusive and manipulative. Emerson, Hawthorne, and Hill did not deny the manifestations of animal magnetism, but they objected to its practice because it employed the body as a medium for the spirit, and thereby left its subjects vulnerable; according to these spiritual and intellectual leaders, the continued study and consideration of mesmerism would be inappropriate and undesirable.

A study of the Unitarian clergyman and Transcendentalist James Freeman Clarke’s writings sheds a different light on the cultural phenomenon of mesmerism. While mesmerism was indeed often a practice of the lowbrow and unrefined, it provided the raw materials from which Clarke reconfigured his conception of man’s nature. In fact, a number of mid-century intellectuals credited the mesmeric trance with reconciling body and spirit. In his private writings, including journals and letters, Clarke details his study and applications of mesmerism alongside those of some of his intellectual contemporaries. Clarke attended at least one intimate mesmeric session with his friend and fellow transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, magnetized some of his own parishioners, and hosted mesmeric experiments in his home. Thus, in his practice of mesmerism, Clarke stepped outside of what his biographer Arthur Bolster has described as a “fundamental conservatism” that was ostensibly “evident in every aspect of his thought and action” (Bolster, 1954: 353). For Clarke, mesmerism allowed an intimate incorporation of the body with theology; through it, the body became a conduit to the soul and to individual character. Clarke’s interest in and practice of mesmerism reveals it as an underground force that not only shaped his thoughts and theology, but also influenced a number of his fellow theologians and intellectuals during the mid-nineteenth century. For these individuals, the border between religion and science was more porous than John William Draper would have had his readers believe.

Healing the Body

In many ways, James Freeman Clarke was a congenial leader among Protestant intellectuals. While his name has faded from memory for most Americans, from the 1840s through to the end of his life in 1888, his influence permeated newspapers and lecture halls in Boston. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Clarke was an educated and active participant in his community. He was an original member of the Transcendentalist Club and co-founded The Western Messenger, a vehicle for Transcendental ideas in the West. He organized and pastored a Unitarian church in Boston, the Church of the Disciples (1841). He was the Chaplain to the Massachusetts Senate (1844), served on the Executive Board of the American Unitarian Association (1845) and Massachusetts Board of Education (1863–1869), was a professor in the Harvard College Divinity School (1867, 1876), and was an elected member of the Board of Overseers at Harvard College (1866–1888). Publishing a series of his sermons in 1873, the Saturday Evening Gazette provided the following introduction of Clarke (1891: 311): “In his denomination Mr. Clarke is recognized as, perhaps more than any other, the leading mind, and is held in high estimation by all classes of Christians. What he says possesses value and interest to a large portion of the community.” Through published essays, lectures, and sermons, Clarke established a respected voice amongst Boston intellectuals. Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1876: 343), the first historian of American Transcendentalism, described Clarke as “the intellectual fellow of the brilliant minds that made the epoch what it was.”

Like many Americans, Clarke first encountered mesmerism as a healing method. Medicine was not yet professionalized in antebellum America, and it was often practiced by amateurs. In this unrestricted atmosphere, mesmerists developed quite a reputation for their healing techniques. In 1837, Clarke accompanied his close friend, author and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, on her visit to a celebrated mesmerist, Loraina Brackett. Clarke had met the intellectually ambitious Fuller in Cambridge in 1830, and as Barbara L. Packer (2000) has explained, the two maintained a curiously intimate epistolary friendship until the end of Fuller’s life in 1848.² From the mesmerist, Fuller was seeking relief from her intense headaches; Clarke recorded the event in his journal under the heading, “Somnambulism in Providence.” While mesmeric practices were flourishing in Boston, Clarke (1837) referred to Providence as the “headquarters of Animal Magnetism” and to Loraina Brackett as “one of the most noted Somnambulists.” Fuller’s physician, Dr Capron, put her into a magnetic trance, and Brackett was called upon to assist with the extreme headaches that Fuller suffered: “She was put in communication with S.M.F. and discovered the point in her head where she was suffering from violent pain, and after some rubbing, the pain was relieved” (Clarke, 1837). Both Clarke and Fuller, then, illustrate their receptivity to mesmeric healing in this candid anecdote.

In addition to providing pain relief, Brackett also demonstrated the psychical facets of mesmerism during Clarke and Fuller’s visit. Although entranced, she remained somewhat conscious of her surroundings as she “told very exactly the progress of time.” She was in an intelligent, rather than catatonic, state. Clarke comments that “Her manners in sleep, were strikingly easy, her thoughts prompt, & she was very graceful & arch in her behavior” (Clarke, 1837). While conversing with Clarke, Brackett accurately described events that were simultaneously taking place in his home of Louisville, Kentucky.³ Dr Capron, her physician, further demonstrated Brackett’s mesmeric capabilities:

He then laid a handkerchief upon her eyes, allowed me [Clarke] to press my fingers upon it, and pointed his finger to her hand. She immediately, with great quickness seized his finger. This was repeated & varied. The motion of her hand seemed mechanical & involuntary. (Clarke, 1837)

Two possible mesmeric explanations exist for Brackett’s reactions to Capron. The physical perspective suggests that because a magnetic bond exists between mesmerist and subject, Brackett’s hand was magnetically drawn to Capron’s. The psychological viewpoint would claim that she clairvoyantly, intuitively “saw” Capron’s actions. In either case, her detection of Capron’s actions was extraordinary, with fascinating implications for the body or mind, or both. Clarke does not attempt to explain Brackett’s demonstration of animal magnetism in his journal, perhaps unsure of what to think about such incredible proceedings. This novel approach to the human body had, however, captured his attention.

Clarke’s interest in treating bodies, as well as souls, is evident in his journal entries as he details topics for examination. In the 1830s and 1840s, he studied mesmerism alongside other developing sciences such as homeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology. While water-cure, head-readings, and healing trances may seem from our twenty-first-century perspective to be far from empirical reasoning, Arthur Wrobel (1987: 3) has noted that “their methodological underpinnings were securely grounded in scientific induction, or Baconianism.” During a time in which much of the human body remained a mystery, many approaches to knowledge and healing had logical, if not accurate, justifications; Clarke expressed interest in these novel methods of treating the human body. As early as March of 1836, he had read about the somnambulic trance in the Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine. In his Extract Book, Clarke (1836) transcribed a brief account of animal magnetism from the Cyclopedia.⁴ This new mesmeric theory had the appeal of scientific backing—or, that of science as it was understood in the nineteenth century: “Mesmer’s theory had just enough science to appeal to a new rationalism—his hypothesis of a universal fluid derived from Newton’s electromagnetic ether” (Wrobel, 1987: 5). Franz Anton Mesmer’s work was in part based on Newton’s laws of attraction, or gravity, and Mesmer (1798–99, 1814: 96) proclaimed that it was “this practice which I profess is not blind empiricism, but a rational method.” Mesmerism was thus carefully grounded in nineteenth-century science, as Clarke would have learned from his research. Rather than dismiss emerging and unrefined sources of knowledge, Clarke eagerly embraced them through study and personal experiences.

In a letter to a friend, Clarke provided one further, more personal, detail of his mesmeric session with Margaret Fuller: he learned of his own mesmeric capabilities. He writes that Brackett “informed me I was possessed of the magnetic power on the strength of which I have already magnetized several persons with some success” (Clarke, Letter to George Davis, 24 January 1838). Apparently intrigued, Clarke also wrote to Fuller that he had tried his hand at mesmerism on a trip to Kentucky. He claims to have “magnetized a lady named Mrs. Esper who laughed at it, till all at once she felt drowsy and said she was going to sleep” (Clarke, 1957: 127). Clarke exercised his new powers once at home in Louisville as well. In a “Diary and Journal” entry from 9 January 1838, Clarke (1838) records “Magnetizing Mrs. L.B.C.” Clarke was practicing his magnetic skills on the wife of L.B. Clark, his landlady and a member of his Louisville congregation, and quite possibly others. Clarke’s interest in mesmerism grew, and he sought to learn more.

After witnessing Loraina Brackett’s clairvoyant feats and magnetizing individuals himself, Clarke (1957: 131) wrote to Margaret Fuller and asked if she would “make me a present of Mr. Hartshorn’s second part of Deleuze.” The book to which he referred was Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, written by French author and mesmerist J.P.F. Deleuze and translated by Thomas C. Hartshorn. In this popular book, Deleuze provides instructions for inducing the magnetic trance, as well as explanations of its efficacy. Clarke is likely to have learned more about mesmerizing techniques and principles from this detailed text. Several months after their initial visit to the mesmerist, upon hearing of Fuller’s persistent headaches, Clarke chided, “you don’t remember, I fear, the advice of the somnambulist—not to talk and write so much.” The suggestion that an intellectual, outspoken woman be more subdued in antebellum America is certainly not surprising; the authority Clarke grants to the somnambulist’s advice, however, is indicative of his own faith in this marginal medical practice. He evidently considered magnetism a powerful healing force and was even confident in his own magnetic capabilities. Clarke (1957: 134) asked Fuller in the fall of 1838, “Do you think if I could have stayed in Providence to magnetize you, you would have fared better?” As part of his ministerial duties, Clarke called on ill parishioners regularly. In addition to healing souls through his prayers and ministry, here he considered healing the body through magnetic passes. Based on the literature he had read, this procedure would have involved the subject sitting on a chair or reclining on a couch, while he waved, or “passed,” his hands around her head and/or body. How often Clarke acted upon the impulse to employ his magnetic powers is unclear. Clarke’s enthusiasm about mesmerism as a novel healing method is evident, however, as well as his desire to provide physical healing to female acquaintances, a desire that went well outside his ministerial duties and certainly approached the boundaries of nineteenth-century propriety.

Clarke’s and his colleagues’ interest in the mesmerized bodies of women continued into the following decade. In 1840, Clarke moved from Louisville back to his hometown of Boston, a bustling city in which “everywhere you met prophets, men and women with new ideas and new plans” (Bolster, 1954: 128). Here, Clarke encountered fellow theologians who shared his interest in mesmerism. At a meeting of Unitarian ministers in 1843, George E. Ellis, a minister and editor of the Christian Examiner, “told stories of Mrs. Jordan, 26 South Bennett St. who is a somnambulist—sees people’s ‘inwards’—tells diseases & cures—” (Clarke, 1843a). Clarke writes that Ellis went on to describe two instances of Mrs. Jordan clairvoyantly revealing cures for melancholy and abdominal pain (Clarke, 1843a). Clarke, then, was joined in his mesmeric fascination by fellow Unitarian ministers—men who did not see any impropriety in entrancing women who were not their wives, intellectuals who did not view religion and medicine as mutually exclusive. At a time when “older philosophical traditions rooted in Christian theological concerns were giving way to mental philosophies that related human mental, emotional, and even spiritual life to physiological—especially neurological—processes,” Clarke continued to engage in the very physical practice of animal magnetism (White, 2009: 22). In these early anecdotes, Clarke, Fuller, and Ellis approach mesmerism through the lens of the body; as his mesmeric experiments continued, Clarke began to investigate the spiritual implications of the trance. For this professional theologian and amateur scientist, evidence obtained through the ostensibly physical practice of mesmerism might just substantiate the soul.

Evoking the Soul

Clarke argues for the significance of the body to man’s spiritual nature in a lecture from 1843 entitled “What is Man?” Clarke very much believed in personal, unique spiritual experiences. He did not, however, believe exclusively in those experiences:

If transcendentalism was right in asserting an inward Revelation of God in the spirit, it is wrong in denying the importance of the outward revelation…There is spirit in man. But besides spirit there is flesh. We have bodies also. This body which surrounds our spirit, with its wonderful construction, made fearfully & wonderfully, with its senses, its organs, its members—this is also to be considered when we ask what is man. Man is a material being as well as immaterial. He is joined to the finite as well as to the infinite. (Clarke, 1843b)

Clarke searched for Divinity within the human mind, and thus the human body, rather than in a transcendence of the body. He viewed the body as part of God’s creation and man’s being, which led him to medical sciences. In 1837, upon the death of a close friend, he wrote, “awful gleams of a supernatural day shed calm light in the innermost chambers of this fleshly tabernacle” (Clarke, 1957: 123). Clarke saw the body as a temple of the spirit; to ignore one’s body and dedicate oneself entirely to the spirit would be to ignore a part of the divine.

As “What is Man?” continues, Clarke describes a third aspect of man, the soul, which unites the body and the spirit. Clarke provides the following distinction between spirit and soul: “the soul is the individual personal being, our I—it is our essential nature. We are souls—we are not spirit, though we are united with spirit—we are not body, although we are united with body—but we are souls” (Clarke, 1843b). The spirit is that part of man which is capable of receiving divine influence, and the soul communicates that influence to one’s physical being. Clarke continues, “The Spirit in man is that which allies him with God and Eternity. It is the organ by which he communicates with God. The Soul is a lower power, in which personality resides, with lower faculties, which through the Body connects itself with the World” (Clarke, 1843b). The soul, then, guides the moral progress that Unitarians and Transcendentalists sought.⁵

Clarke then turns to the evidence of the trance: mesmeric subjects can perceive all aspects of man’s being because they are connected to both the material and spiritual worlds. The trance elucidates the distinction between soul and spirit; according to Clarke, the concept of a threefold nature

has been revived of late years by the magnetic somnambulists of Germany—In Kerner’s Prophetess of Prevorst & Werner’s book on Guardian Spirits we find the distinction between Spirit soul & body asserted & described by the clairvoyants in their luminous trances—I will read you a few extracts from their reports on this subject.

“The spirit can receive the Most Highest within itself. The soul can only think & feel concerning Him. The soul is united inseparably with the spirit & is its organ in the external world. It has a twofold direction. In the one it turns toward body & time, in the other toward spirit & eternity.” (Clarke, 1843b)

According to these somnambulists, the soul is an entity that mediates between the spirit and the body, just as Clarke had discerned from scripture. The somnambulists’ entranced state allows them to distinguish body and spirit, which establishes the need for a mediator to connect the two. Ever the theologian, Clarke finds in these mesmeric writings not secular mysticism, but rather a clarification of the parts of man that might guide fellow Unitarians towards a better understanding of God.

In mesmerism, or the entranced body, Clarke found confirmation of the soul and of scripture, a force that could potentially unite the spirit and the flesh, the ideal and the material. He presents the existence of the spirit and soul as factual, thus forging an alliance between facets of religious belief and science. An important philosopher for Transcendentalists, Emanuel Swedenborg, had provided a template for the coalition Clarke was seeking, drawing on a scientific background and describing spiritual experiences in rational, scientific terms. In Arcana Coelestia (1749–1756), Swedenborg had attributed unconscious activity to the spirit; through this unconscious activity, he claimed, the Lord reveals spiritual activity to the physical senses. If there was a correspondence between the spirit and the body, as Swedenborg suggested, then all that remained was for liberal nineteenth-century theologians and intellectuals to gain access to unconscious activity; hereby, the spiritual world might be revealed, and the visions of Swedenborg might be substantiated in increasingly scientific terms. Deleuze (1843: 69) directly relates mesmerism to spirituality in Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, claiming that the somnambulic trances of mesmerism “demonstrate the distinction of two things; the two-fold existence of the internal and external man in a single individual. They offer a direct proof of the spirituality of the soul, and an answer to all the objections raised against its immortality.” According to Deleuze (1843: 214), magnetism is not wholly spiritual or physical, but “partakes equally of the two elements which compose our being.” The mediator of these two elements is the soul that Clarke discusses in “What is Man?”—a soul that could be reached through magnetic passes over the body.

While Clarke’s mesmeric experiences may have begun with the body, then, the minister’s mesmeric philosophy evolved to incorporate the soul, and thereby spirituality. The consciousness might be viewed as the soul’s physical manifestation, and as Clarke (1854) would later propose, “the appropriate evidence of spiritual ideas is the testimony of the consciousness, for all spiritual truth must be spiritually discerned.” In the mesmeric trance, the consciousness testified to a higher, spiritual nature. Clarke (1860) notes animal magnetism as an “example of miracles…of suspensions of common laws of nature by the inworking of higher forces.”⁶ In other words, despite stage demonstrations that featured young women chasing birds across stages in American cities, mesmerism had the potential to access the spiritual forces within man. Mesmerism might just take man one step closer to substantiating the spiritual realm. Turner (1985: 164) has described many American spiritualists as “seeking their own scientific pathway to spiritual enlightenment…What was important was to believe that religion needed no miracles, that it did rest on secure knowledge, that it could pass the test of science.” The same could be said for Clarke’s pursuit of mesmerism. As Clarke would have read in Deleuze’s Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism (1843: 93), ordinary somnambulists might attain clairvoyance and the ability to offer medical advice, but some reached an exalted state, in which their visions became spiritual: “In this new situation, the mind is filled with religious ideas…He sees everywhere the action of Providence…The independence of the soul, the liberty of man, immortality, are all to him evident truths. He is convinced that God hears us.” Through magnetic trances, Clarke and some of his contemporaries studied and experimented with human consciousness, or the soul, attempting to understand spirituality in new ways. By no means did they consider mesmerism an exclusive means to spiritual enlightenment, but evidence suggests that they did investigate its powers.⁷

A study of mesmerism in Clarke’s work, then, highlights the shortcomings of the secularization thesis, for “theories of animal magnetism, called Mesmerism after their Austrian expositor, Franz Anton Mesmer, probed the boundaries of popular religion, medicine, and science” (Butler, 1990: 234–235). Despite its origins with the physician Mesmer, as a form of healing or physical therapy, historian Jon Butler (1990: 235) has found that, “outside France and especially in Britain and the United States, adherents often cast Mesmerism in religious terms.” The unconscious, clairvoyant experience of a mesmeric trance certainly seemed to parallel the intense inner experiences and self-development that many “new school” American Unitarians promoted. In his study of psychology and religious belief, Christopher G. White (2009: 14) has confirmed that “beginning in this period, a broad coalition of religious liberals used these new psychologies to find in external, especially bodily, conditions signs of inner spiritual states.” If spiritual states manifested themselves in the physical body, the implication for ministers was significant; a physical assessment, such as a mesmeric trance or phrenological reading, could provide valuable information, even a map, for self-improvement or heightened spirituality. Robert C. Fuller (1982: 9) writes, “the discovery that nature’s forces could be harnessed and used to restore harmony to physical systems reinforced even the most idealistic of aspirations. For many the doctrine of animal magnetism proved that physical health, moral improvement, and social progress could all be lawfully engineered.” The development of the individual might be aided by animal magnetism, which allowed one to simultaneously treat physical illness and cultivate spiritual awareness. This new medicine need not draw people away from religion, but instead might bolster belief. For religious intellectuals like Clarke, the marriage of science and spiritual awareness might usher in a new era of Christianity.

Just how far might this new power extend? As Clarke’s psychological investigations continued, his writings increasingly focused on the mesmerist’s power to penetrate the individual’s consciousness. In 1843, Clarke attended lectures by Dr Joseph Rhodes Buchanan on phrenomesmerism, a practice that combined theories of phrenology and mesmerism.⁸ Clarke explains in a letter to Livvy, his sister-in-law, that Buchanan’s “mode of proceeding is to put his finger against the head, where the organ is supposed to lie, and presently the patient is expected to manifest the symptoms. The person would then display the trait which the mesmerist touched.” On the occasion that Clarke describes, Buchanan is experimenting upon a man named Dr Dana. Clarke gives the following report in a letter to a relative:

Yesterday he tried Dr. Dana, and touched his finger to an organ in the back of his head wh. he calls “Buffoonery”—Presently the Dr. began to laugh in a very violent way, and on being interrogated, replied, he could not help it. Then he declared that he felt as if he should like to jump from the gallery of a church into the aisle & see the people scatter. The Dr. was so excited that he kept laughing in this spasmodic manner all the evening.—I also attended another examination, in which a Dr. Lane was touched by Dr. B. & exhibited striking phenomena. But I will send you a printed report by & by. (Clarke, 23 March 1843)

Buchanan did not present these “striking phenomena” as meaningless spectacle; instead, as Robert C. Fuller (1982: 54, 56) has explained, Buchanan argued that mesmerism brought together “man’s physical and spiritual natures” and “forged the relative contributions of medical psychology and theology into a higher synthesis.”⁹ As the mesmeric trance allowed direct access to the soul, it might provide the individual a heightened, unified awareness of himself. What’s more, when combined with phrenology, mesmerism enabled practitioners to locate and manipulate character traits. The next logical step, then, is that man might use mesmerism as a tool to improve his moral nature and behavior.

Cultivating Character

As Clarke continued his mesmeric investigations, he was joined in his home by a number of intellectual fellows. To these observers, mesmerism held the promise of substantiating the spiritual realm and providing a path to self-improvement. In the winter of 1844, a small group of Boston elites gathered in the parlor of Clarke’s home, with Dr Buchanan once more at the helm. Anna Q.T. Parsons, the mesmeric subject, was an intelligent young woman and a friend of many of the era’s transcendentalists. She was a member of the Brook Farm Community, a secretary for the Boston Religious Union of Associationists (1847–1850), and would become active in the Women’s Rights Movement in the 1850s. Parsons, along with many New Englanders, had recently discovered the powers of animal magnetism; upon being placed in a mesmeric trance, she displayed the psychic power “to discover by holding a letter in her hand, the character of the writer” (Clarke, 1844). The technique she employed “was either to hold the letter in her hand without looking at it, or to put it against her forehead, and to give herself up to the psychic impressions then received” (Orvis, 1928: xiv). In this manner, Parsons described the character of a host of notable individuals such as Joseph Buckminster, Harriet Martineau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aaron Burr, John Keats, and Daniel Boone. Clarke took part in questioning the mesmerized Parsons about the impressions she received, and made detailed notes in his Commonplace Book. As with Dr Buchanan’s earlier phrenomesmeric experiments, character is at the center of these experiments. Whether of the mesmeric subject or of someone else, character was ostensibly manifest under the spell of mesmerism.

In addition to Dr Buchanan, Clarke was initially joined in these mesmeric sessions only by Buchanan’s wife, his own wife Anna, his sister Sarah, and Parsons’ sister Helen. Margaret Fuller soon joined Clarke in his mesmeric experiments, and she invited others. Apparently enthusiastic about their discovery, she referred to the mesmeric gatherings as “our new Ecstatica” in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

At James Clarke’s there are to be, next Monday evening Mesmeric experiments of reading letters &c tried on the same Lady of whom I wrote you in my last. Sarah [Clarke] desires me to invite your presence…No one is to be there but myself and S. and A. [Samuel and Anna Ward] with whom I am staying. (Fuller, 1844: 181, 180)

Despite her emphasis on the private, inconspicuous nature of this gathering, Emerson politely declined Fuller’s invitation. Clarke’s mesmeric meetings did expand, however, to include Samuel and Anna Ward, Charles K. Newcomb, and quite possibly others.¹⁰ According to Clarke’s sister, Parsons “comes to our house as to that of a friend, where she may expand, and give pleasure by the use of what seem to us real and uncommon powers” (Fuller, 1844: 181). Clarke’s thorough journal transcriptions of two of these mesmeric gatherings indicate his studious interest in Parsons’ readings.

As Clarke’s mesmeric gatherings illustrate, many young luminaries were intrigued by the access to mental processes that mesmerism promised. Like other pseudosciences of the nineteenth century, it was received “not only among the uninformed and credulous but also among the respectable and educated” (Wrobel, 1987: 1). Clarke’s wife, Anna, wrote to her sister in 1849 that Ephraim Peabody and Chandler Robbins, both ministers who attended meetings of the Transcendentalist Club, possessed clairvoyant powers such as “reading” letters while entranced, by placing them on their heads and receiving impressions, much as Anna Parsons had done. A departure from the norm of female subjects, these educated men allowed their bodies to be placed in a mesmeric trance. Anna Clarke (Letter to Elizabeth Huidekoper, 20 March 1849) relates that “Mr. Robbins was here yesterday & we asked him about it—he said that in his experiments he uttered himself in thoughts which were as wonderful to himself as to those around him. He said he would let us read his ‘book of characters’—The soul has undeveloped powers.” Upon hearing Robbins’ reports, Anna Clarke verifies that mesmerism’s significance and scope transcended the physical body, allowing one to access the soul. Robbins also felt that his consciousness was altered in a positive way when he was entranced, as he was impressed with his own expression and clairvoyance. The enthusiasm that Robbins, Clarke, and other young ministers display towards animal magnetism indicates their interest in this emerging science, and their receptivity to accessing man’s or woman’s soul through his or her manipulated body.

The trait-manifestation experiments of Joseph Buchanan and the character readings of Anna Parsons and Chandler Robbins suggested to discerning observers that the body might allow one to “read” an individual’s character. From mesmerism, a reliable system of determining and developing man’s moral constitution might be established. Clarke (1859) claims to have derived “great benefit” from phrenology because it is a “system of human nature,” and “a system helps one much in practice…[to] give warning, comfort, advise.” Similarly, if one’s character is discerned and catalogued by a mesmerist, as in Robbins’ “book of characters,” one might devise a regimen of cultivating desirable traits and eradicating unfavorable ones. Coming on the heels of the Age of Reason, and foreshadowing the intellectual milieu of Darwin, James, and Freud, mesmerism held a particular appeal to educated Americans. The magnetized body might provide evidence of the spirit, enhance one’s moral awareness, and contribute to the perfectibility of the individual. Sered and Barnes (2005: 6) have written of the “perfectionist Protestant spirit of the day,” finding that “if perfection came about through awareness, then one could hope for change, healing, and even salvation through education. The implicit message of this approach was the concomitant sense of responsibility for transforming oneself.” Radical though it may seem, mesmerism might provide a method for cultivating desirable moral traits, along with a holistic view of man’s constitution. What began as a medical science might take one to new spiritual heights.

Thus, while some prominent contemporaries challenged animal magnetism on grounds of transgressing the bounds of gender propriety or the sanctity of the individual, Clarke continued to experiment with it, as he had with phrenology prior to and concurrently with his mesmeric activities, and as he would with spiritualism in the following decade. In sermon notes, Clarke (1847) proclaims his confidence in the pseudosciences and reforms that many were skeptical of: “So I have seen every new reform, every new science made to appear supremely absurd…Phrenology & animal magnetism, antislavery & homeopathy & transcendental philosophy have been refuted & put down again & again—but the smoke blew away, & they remained just where they were before.” While emerging sciences might not take hold immediately, and, in the interim, might be exploited by charlatans, Clarke believed they held grains of truth that provided enlightenment to those who maintained open minds.

While mesmeric theory clearly influenced Clarke’s concept of human nature, and thereby his theology, he did not impose mesmeric practices on his congregants. Instead, mesmerism remained mostly in the private spheres of Clarke’s home and study. As mesmerism’s popularity and credibility in American culture declined in the 1850s, the wisdom of this choice was evident. By eschewing popular culture in the pulpit, Clarke maintained his “acceptable and useful” role in mainstream America:

The nineteenth century in America was an optimistic age that believed in progress and wanted to reform its theology and its institutions to speed the advance in which it had such faith. But at the same time, it wanted the changes to be gradual and reasonable for it had a fundamental conservatism born of a respect for what was good and valid in the past. (Bolster, 1954: 359)

While Clarke might encourage his parishioners towards a liberal view of Christianity, integrating mesmeric practice into his sermons would have likely been one step too far, threatening his authority as a minister and theologian. Instead, at this early stage of modern scientific medical practice, Clarke preserved his credibility and overt conservatism by divorcing his public persona from some of his private scientific pursuits.

Mesmerism’s popularity waned in the 1850s, and it was soon replaced by spiritualism, mind cure, and eventually psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth century. The medical establishment emerged, and with it orthodox medical practice: “with the emergence of an improved materia medica and healing techniques, orthodox medicine regained the ascendency, ironically profiting because it absorbed, if not appropriated outright, principles of healing from the very medical heresies it so often publicly debunked” (Wrobel, 1987: 17–18). Mesmerism had enjoyed a brief, shining moment at the center of American popular science and culture, and from it blossomed a new field of psychology, one in which the levers of identity, trauma, distress, and happiness might be accessed just below waking consciousness. Mesmerism was evidential and rational, accompanied by physical explanation and experimental proof. It was simultaneously idealistic and romantic, putting the subject in a transcendent unconscious state. It granted authority to the individual experience of subjects and validated personal truths, and it made assessments and judgments of moral character. In the mesmeric trance, individuals found a simultaneous engagement of the body, spirit, and soul that promised fascinating revelations in the fields of medicine and religion; from what was often viewed as lowbrow culture, a prominent minister reconfigured belief in palpable ways.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

Archival research for this article was completed with the support of a Benjamin F. Stevens Short-Term Research Fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Notes

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