He was forced to yield to evidence.

A strong wall, as it were, crumbled within him; for his life had rested on two bases,--indifference in matters of religion and a firm disbelief in magnetism.

When it was proved to him that the senses--faculties purely physical, organs, the effects of which could be explained--attained to some of the attributes of the infinite, magnetism upset, or at least it seemed to him to upset, the powerful arguments of Spinoza.

The finite and the infinite, two incompatible elements according to that remarkable man, were here united, the one in the other.

No matter what power he gave to the divisibility and mobility of matter he could not help recognizing that it possessed qualities that were almost divine.
He was too old now to connect those phenomena to a system, and compare them with those of sleep, of vision, of light.