Couldn't hypnotism also be considered a pseudo-science in its early days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotism#History
This description from those times sounds very bizarre now: In as much as patients can throw themselves into the nervous sleep, and manifest all the usual phenomena of Mesmerism, through their own unaided efforts, as I have so repeatedly proved by causing them to maintain a steady fixed gaze at any point, concentrating their whole mental energies on the idea of the object looked at; or that the same may arise by the patient looking at the point of his own finger, or as the Magi of Persia and Yogi of India have practised for the last 2,400 years, for religious purposes, throwing themselves into their ecstatic trances by each maintaining a steady fixed gaze at the tip of his own nose; it is obvious that there is no need for an exoteric influence to produce the phenomena of Mesmerism. […] The great object in all these processes is to induce a habit of abstraction or concentration of attention, in which the subject is entirely absorbed with one idea, or train of ideas, whilst he is unconscious of, or indifferently conscious to, every other object, purpose, or action. (ibid) Strangely, mostly references to hypnotism, like the one above, have little or no reference to Abbe Faria, and its history begins many decades after the Abbe's times. Interesting! So when does non-Western knowledge become "Science" in the "modern" world? FN 2009/11/11 Gabriel de Figueiredo <[email protected]>: > FWIW, Gregor Mendel, who is known as the "father of modern genetics", was a > monk; as was, in a manner of speaking, Abbe Faria our own "father of > hypnotism". > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science > http://scibel.com/scibel/materials_myths_few_scientists_true_christians.html -- Frederick Noronha :: +91-832-2409490 Writing, editing, alt.publishing, photography, journalism
