Here was the background of Quimby’s later practice, a background from which he could never quite break free. An austere moral commentary on that background is to be found in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in 1841 had written his fiancée when she proposed trying mesmerism as a cure for her headaches:
My spirit is moved to talk to thee to day about these magnetic miracles, and to beseech thee to take no part in them. I am unwilling that a power should be exercised on thee, of which we know neither the origin nor the consequence, and the phenomena of which seem rather calculated to bewilder us, than to teach us any truths about the present or future state of being. If I possessed such a power over thee, I should not dare to exercise it; nor can I consent to its being exercised by another. Supposing that this power arises from the transfusion of one spirit into another, it seems to me that the sacredness of an individual is violated by it; there would be an intrusion into thy holy of holies.30
The words “electric” and “magnetic” echo almost malevolently through The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. In the earlier book Hawthorne grants that psychology may “endeavor to reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting them as altogether fabulous,” but his attitude through both books is summed up in a passage in The Blithedale Romance where a stranger tells of the wonders of animal magnetism:
He cited instances of the miraculous power of one human being over the will and passions of another; insomuch that settled grief was but a shadow beneath the influence of a man possessing this potency, and the strong love of years melted away like a vapor. . . . Human character was but soft wax in his hands; and guilt, or virtue, only the forms into which he should see fit to mould it. . . . It is unutterable, the horror and disgust with which I listened, and saw that, if these things were ● ● ●
30 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932), p. lxxv.