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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II MODERN MIND-MOVEMENTS During the eighteenth century the belief in the prevalence of witchcraft gradually made way for a more natural and cheerful outlook on life.' Men ceased to dread the existence everywhere of malign influences, but continued strongly to believe in abnormal curative powers. Even today the names of Paracelsus and Mesmer, to mention only a few among many, are not unknown.2 While men of lesser note are forgotten, the fame of these is still glimmering sufficiently to show the thread of historic continuity that binds the present to the past. Mesmer is commonly credited with being the father of the modern mind-movements; a hasty sketch of his work and environment must, therefore, find a place here. In the second half of the eighteenth century an Austrian priest, Gassner by name, won great fame through his remarkable cures. Gassner, like so many others that come to the world with a message of relief, had earlier in his life passed through a long siege of sickness, during which he came to form peculiar views on the nature of many diseases. Convinced that these infirmities were the result, not of natural agencies, but of evil spirits, he resolved to cure them by means of the exorcisms and prayers of the Church. He is commonly considered to be the immediate predecessor of Mesmer. Of these two men and their mutual relations, Podmore says: 'The executions for witchcraft in Salem, Mass., took place from July 19 to September 22, 1692. In 1736 the English statute against witchcraft was repealed, although eight years later (1728) Rhode Island reenacted its laws against witchcraft. The last trial for witchcraft in Germany was in 1749 at Wurzburg. In Switzerland, in the Protestant canton Glarus, a girl was executed on this score as late as 1783, and in Sout...
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