ABSTRACT
Author begins with Newton, because the ways in which he was understood all too well or little provide much of the background in this area, even a hundred years or more after 1727, the year of his death. The debates within and about mesmerism were analogous, and allow some insight into its strength: it seems to have offered an enticing terrain of argument for advocates of various class agendas for ordering, shuffling or levelling the social hierarchy. W. C. Engledue's same 1842 lecture is also one of the first celebrations of the new 'science' of 'phreno-mesmerism' or, as he called it here, 'the magnetic excitement of cerebration'. Here people can note that when, over at the Lancet, Wakley came to pen one of the longest polemics in his campaign against mesmerism, the allegation he laboured most was of conceptual formlessness.
