He was for three
weeks in the tower, and was daily visited by the curious. Yet in these
three weeks the half-conscious animal 'learned to read tolerably well,
to count, to write figures' (_that_ he could do when he arrived,
Feuerbach says), 'he made progress in writing a good hand, and learned
a simple tune on the harpsichord,' pretty well for a half-unconscious
animal.
In July 1828, after being adopted by the excited town of Nuremberg, he
was sent to be educated by and live with a schoolmaster named Daumer,
and was studied by Feuerbach. They found, in Kaspar, a splendid
example of the 'sensitive,' and a noble proof of the powers of 'animal
magnetism.' In Germany, at this time, much was talked and written
about 'somnambulism' (the hypnotic state), and about a kind of 'animal
magnetism' which, in accordance with Mesmer's theory, was supposed to
pass between stars, metals, magnets, and human beings. The effects
produced on the patient by the hypnotist (now ascribed to
'suggestion') were attributed to a 'magnetic efflux,' and
Reichenbach's subjects saw strange currents flowing from metals and
magnets. His experiments have never, perhaps, been successfully
repeated, though hysterical persons have pretended to feel the
traditional effects, even when non-magnetic objects were pointed at
them.
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