The judicious employment of clairvoyance in the diagnostication and treatment of disease is a legitimate use of its power. In the detection of hidden sources of human misery and of conditions that generate physical discords no sight less penetrative than that of a genuine clairvoyant can avail much. This notwithstanding, the careful instructions of scientifically trained judgment are more in harmony with rational sense than the blunderings of undeveloped or non-medical seers, only a few among whom can reveal the causes of disease. The condition of seership is one of great impressibility and is too apt to take on and reflect the fears, surmises or established convictions of the patient. Every sufferer—whether blessed or not with intelligence—will have definite views regarding the nature and probable cause of his complaints and connected misfortunes. The clairvoyant is almost certain to become involved therein and to be misled by contact with the dominant feelings and judgment of such a patient, unless the seer or seeress is in full possession of the faculty of sight while in the act of diagnostication.
It is unphilosophical to suppose that all clairvoyants are equally or similarly endowed, and, e.g., it is rarely that a genuine medical seer possesses commensurate abilities in other departments of investigation: I mean that a first rate seer of disease is seldom more than a
second or third rate prescriber. This incapacity may be manifested immediately after an examination and prognosis which have been pronounced satisfactory. On the other hand, it happens in alternative cases that only the faculty to prescribe is perfect, for certain clairvoyants can detect the proper remedy for a disease, the origin, location or symptoms of which they have professed no power to discern. It is therefore frequently wise to obtain your diagnosis from one and your remedy from another. The degree of endowments, as well as the kind or class, must be taken also into account. If a mind is endowed with the power to discern objects through the mystic distance—discriminating between fancies and facts—it is a misuse of such a faculty to press it into the treatment of bodily diseases. The reverse is equally true, and the penalties of misemployment in either case are doubts and errors.
In the course of his inner life it may happen that the seer accomplishes a silent spiritual unfoldment, and immortal attributes may bloom one by one in the garden of his soul. In his clairvoyant exercises a kind of apotheosis may occur, an ascension of ordinary powers into regions of higher use. Rooting up its attachments to material things, the whole mind may be dedicated to those that are transmundane, and the seer may thus advance to the perception of great truths and principles. The investigation of disease becomes then almost impossible; the law of seership on that plane is repealed, so to speak, and any use of the inferior powers by one who is thus unfolded would be attended with penalties as a transgression of the operations and requirements of higher law. In many cases merely worldly wants, or poverty of moral faculties, have urged very high clairvoyants into unprofitable forms of the medical business, into telling of fortunes, reading the stars, psychometry, etc., to the exclusion of those spiritual exercises which expand the soul and develop its latent abilities. The
consequence is loss of virtue in the spirit, retardation of the normal processes of growth, and sometimes a total suspension of the clairvoyant gift. The power of comprehensive vision may be impaired by mental infidelity and devotion to small things.