Of the substances known to compose the body of man, there have been

discovered in the stars already, hydrogen, sodium, calcium, magnesium

and iron. In all the stars observed, numbering many hundreds, hydrogen

was found, except in two. Now, if we recollect how they have deprecated

Paracelsus and his theory of man and the stars being composed of like

substances; how ridiculed he was by astronomers and physicists, for his

ideas of chemical affinity and attraction between the two; and then

realize that the spectroscope has vindicated one of his assertions at

least, is it so absurd to prophesy that in time all the rest of his

theories will be substantiated?

And now, a very natural question is suggested. How did Paracelsus

come to learn anything of the composition of the stars, when, till a

very recent period—till the discovery of the spectroscope in fact—the

constituents of the heavenly bodies were utterly unknown to our learned {169}

academies? And even now, notwithstanding tele-spectroscope and other

very important modern improvements, except a few elements and a

hypothetical chromosphere, everything is yet a mystery for them in the

stars. Could Paracelsus have been so sure of the nature of the starry

host, unless he had means of which science knows nothing? Yet knowing

nothing she will not even hear pronounced the very names of these

means, which are—hermetic philosophy and alchemy.

We must bear in mind, moreover, that _Paracelsus was the discoverer

of hydrogen, and knew well all its properties and composition_ long

before any of the orthodox academicians ever thought of it; that he had

studied astrology and astronomy, as all the fire-philosophers did; and

that, if he did assert that man is in a direct affinity with the stars,

he knew well what he asserted.

The next point for the physiologists to verify is his proposition that

the nourishment of the body comes not merely through the stomach,

“but also imperceptibly through the magnetic force, which resides in

all nature and by which every individual member draws its specific

nourishment to itself.” Man, he further says, draws not only health

from the elements when in equilibrium, but also disease when they are

disturbed. Living bodies are subject to the laws of attraction and

chemical affinity, as science admits; the most remarkable physical

property of organic tissues, according to physiologists, is the

property of _imbibition_. What more natural, then, than this theory

of Paracelsus, that this absorbent, attractive, and chemical body of

ours gathers into itself the astral or sidereal influences? “The sun

and the stars attract from us to themselves, and we again from them to

us.” What objection can science offer to this? What it is that we give

off, is shown in Baron Reichenbach’s discovery of the odic emanations

of man, which are identical with flames from magnets, crystals, and in

fact from all vegetable organisms.

The unity of the universe was asserted by Paracelsus, who says that

“the human body is possessed of primeval stuff (or cosmic matter); the

spectroscope has proved the assertion by showing that the same chemical

elements which exist upon earth and in the sun, are also found in all

the stars. The spectroscope does more: it shows that all the stars are

_suns_, similar in constitution to our own;[296] and as we are told by

Professor Mayer,[297] that the magnetic condition of the earth changes

with every variation upon the sun’s surface, and is said to be “in {170}

subjection to _emanations_ from the sun,” the stars being suns must

also give off emanations which affect us in proportionate degrees.

“In our dreams,” says Paracelsus, “we are like the plants, which have

also the elementary and vital body, but possess not the spirit. In our

sleep the astral body is free and can, by the elasticity of its nature,

either hover round in proximity with its sleeping vehicle, or soar

higher to hold converse with its starry parents, or even communicate

with its brothers at great distances. Dreams of a prophetic character,

prescience, and present wants, are the faculties of the astral spirit.

To our elementary and grosser body, these gifts are not imparted, for

at death it descends into the bosom of the earth and is reunited to the

physical elements, while the several spirits return to the stars. The

animals,” he adds, “have also their presentiments, for they too have an

astral body.”

Van Helmont, who was a disciple of Paracelsus, says much the same,

though his theories on magnetism are more largely developed, and still

more carefully elaborated. The _Magnale Magnum_, the means by which

the secret magnetic property “enables one person to affect another

mutually, is attributed by him to that universal sympathy which exists

between all things in nature. The cause produces the effect, the

effect refers itself back to the cause, and both are reciprocated.

“Magnetism,” he says, “is an unknown property of a heavenly nature;

very much resembling the stars, and not at all impeded by any

boundaries of space or time.... Every created being possesses his own

celestial power and is closely allied with heaven. This magic power of

man, which thus can operate externally, lies, as it were, hidden in

the inner man. This magical wisdom and strength thus sleeps, but, by

a mere suggestion is roused into activity, and becomes more living,

the more the outer man of flesh and the darkness is repressed ... and

this, I say, the kabalistic art effects; it brings back to the soul

that magical yet natural strength which like a startled sleep had left

it.”[298]

Both Van Helmont and Paracelsus agree as to the great potency of the

will in the state of ecstasy; they say that “the spirit is everywhere

diffused; and the spirit is the medium of magnetism;” that pure

primeval magic does not consist in superstitious practices and vain

ceremonies but in the imperial will of man. “It is not the spirits of

heaven and of hell which are the masters over physical nature, but

the soul and spirit of man which are concealed in him as the fire is

concealed in the flint.”

The theory of the sidereal influence on man was enunciated by all the

mediæval philosophers. “The stars consist equally of the elements {171}

of earthly bodies,” says Cornelius Agrippa, “and therefore the ideas

attract each other.... Influences only go forth through the help of the

spirit; but this spirit is diffused through the whole universe and is

in full accord with the human spirits. The magician who would acquire

supernatural powers must possess _faith_, _love_, and _hope_.... In

all things there is a secret power concealed, and thence come the

miraculous powers of magic.”

The modern theory of General Pleasanton[299] singularly coincides

with the views of the fire-philosophers. His view of the positive and

negative electricities of man and woman, and the mutual attraction

and repulsion of everything in nature seems to be copied from that

of Robert Fludd, the Grand Master of the Rosicrucians of England.

“When two men approach each other,” says the fire-philosopher, “their

magnetism is either passive or active; that is, positive or negative.

If the emanations which they send out are broken or thrown back, there

arises antipathy. But when the emanations pass through each other from

both sides, then there is positive magnetism, for the rays proceed from

the centre to the circumference. In this case they not only affect

sicknesses but also moral sentiments. This magnetism or sympathy is

found not only among animals but also in plants and in animals.”[300]

And now we will notice how, when Mesmer had imported into France his

“baquet” and system based entirely on the philosophy and doctrines of

the Paracelsites—the great psychological and physiological discovery

was treated by the physicians. It will demonstrate how much ignorance,

superficiality, and prejudice can be displayed by a scientific body,

when the subject clashes with their own cherished theories. It is the

more important because, to the neglect of the committee of the French

Academy of 1784 is probably due the present materialistic drift of the

public mind; and certainly the gaps in the atomic philosophy which we

have seen its most devoted teachers confessing to exist. The committee

of 1784 comprised men of such eminence as Borie, Sallin, d’Arcet,

and the famous Guillotin, to whom were subsequently added, Franklin,

Leroi, Bailly, De Borg and Lavoisier. Borie died shortly afterward

and Magault succeeded him. There can be no doubt of two things, viz.:

that the committee began their work under strong prejudices and only

because peremptorily ordered to do it by the king; and that their

manner of observing the delicate facts of mesmerism was injudicious

and illiberal. Their report, drawn by Bailly, was intended to be a

death-blow to the new science. It was spread ostentatiously throughout

all the schools and ranks of society, arousing the bitterest feelings {172}

among a large portion of the aristocracy and rich commercial class,

who had patronized Mesmer and had been eye-witnesses of his cures.

Ant. L. de Jussieu, an academician of the highest rank, who had

thoroughly investigated the subject with the eminent court-physician,

d’Eslon, published a counter-report drawn with minute exactness, in

which he advocated the careful observation by the medical faculty of

the therapeutic effects of the magnetic fluid and insisted upon the

immediate publication of their discoveries and observations. His demand

was met by the appearance of a great number of memoirs, polemical

works, and dogmatical books developing new facts; and Thouret’s works

entitled _Recherches et Doutes sur le Magnetisme Animal_, displaying

a vast erudition, stimulated research into the records of the past,

and the magnetic phenomena of successive nations from the remotest

antiquity were laid before the public.

The doctrine of Mesmer was simply a restatement of the doctrines of

Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Santanelli, and Maxwell, the Scotchman; and

he was even guilty of copying texts from the work of Bertrand, and

enunciating them as his own principles.[301] In Professor Stewart’s

work,[302] the author regards our universe as composed of atoms with

some sort of medium between them as the machine, and the laws of energy

as the laws working this machine. Professor Youmans calls this “a

modern doctrine,” but we find among the twenty-seven propositions laid

down by Mesmer, in 1775, just one century earlier, in his _Letter to a

Foreign Physician_, the following:

_1st. There exists a mutual influence between the heavenly bodies, the

earth, and living bodies._

_2d. A fluid, universally diffused and continued, so as to admit no

vacuum, whose subtility is beyond all comparison, and which, from its

nature, is capable of receiving, propagating, and communicating all the

impressions of motion, is the medium of this influence._

It would appear from this, that the theory is not so modern after all.

Professor Balfour Stewart says, “We may regard the universe in the

light of a vast physical machine.” And Mesmer:

_3d. This reciprocal action is subject to mechanical laws, unknown up

to the present time._

Professor Mayer, reaffirming Gilbert’s doctrine that the earth is a

great magnet, remarks that the mysterious variations in the intensity

of its force seem to be in subjection to emanations from the sun,

“changing with the apparent daily and yearly revolutions of that orb, {173}

and pulsating in sympathy with the huge waves of fire which sweep over

its surface.” He speaks of “the constant fluctuation, the ebb and flow

of the earth’s directive influence.” And Mesmer:

_4th._ “_From this action result alternate effects which may be

considered a flux and reflux._”

_6th. It is by this operation (the most universal of those presented to

us by nature) that the relations of activity occur between the heavenly

bodies, the earth, and its constituent parts._

There are two more which will be interesting reading to our modern

scientists:

_7th. The properties of matter, and of organized body, depend on this

operation._

_8th. The animal body experiences the alternate effects of this agent;

and it is by insinuating itself into the substance of the nerves, that

it immediately affects them._

Among other important works which appeared between 1798 and 1824, when

the French Academy appointed its second commission to investigate

mesmerism, the _Annales du Magnetisme Animal_, by the Baron d’Henin

de Cuvillier, Lieutenant-General, Chevalier of St. Louis, member of

the Academy of Sciences, and correspondent of many of the learned

societies of Europe, may be consulted with great advantage. In 1820

the Prussian government instructed the Academy of Berlin to offer a

prize of three hundred ducats in gold for the best thesis on mesmerism.

The Royal Scientific Society of Paris, under the presidency of His

Royal Highness the Duc d’Angoulême, offered a gold medal for the

same purpose. The Marquis de la Place, peer of France, one of the

_Forty_ of the Academy of Sciences, and honorary member of the learned

societies of all the principal European governments, issued a work

entitled _Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités_, in which this

eminent scientist says: “Of all the instruments that we can employ

to know the imperceptible agents of nature, the most sensitive are

the nerves, especially when exceptional influences increase their

sensibility.... The singular phenomena which result from this extreme

nervous sensitiveness of certain individuals, have given birth to

diverse opinions as to the existence of a new agent, which has

been named animal magnetism.... We are so far from knowing all the

agents of nature and their various modes of action that it would be

hardly philosophical to deny the phenomena, simply because they are

inexplicable, in the actual state of our information. It is simply our

duty to examine them with an attention as much more scrupulous as it

seems difficult to admit them.”

The experiments of Mesmer were vastly improved upon by the Marquis

de Puysegur, who entirely dispensed with apparatus and produced {174}

remarkable cures among the tenants of his estate at Busancy. These

being given to the public, many other educated men experimented with

like success, and in 1825 M. Foissac proposed to the Academy of

Medicine to institute a new inquiry. A special committee, consisting of

Adelon, Parisey, Marc, Burdin, sen., with Husson as reporter, united

in a recommendation that the suggestion should be adopted. They make

the manly avowal that “in science no decision whatever is absolute

and irrevocable,” and afford us the means to estimate the value which

should be attached to the conclusions of the Franklin committee of

1784, by saying that “the experiments on which this judgment was

founded appeared to have been conducted without the simultaneous and

necessary assembling together of all the commissioners, and _also with

moral predispositions_, which, according to the principles of the

fact which they were appointed to examine, _must cause their complete

failure_.”

What they say concerning magnetism as a secret remedy, has been said

many times by the most respected writers upon modern Spiritualism,

namely: “It is the duty of the Academy to study it, to subject it to

trials; finally, to take away the use and practice of it from persons

quite strangers to the art, who abuse this means, and make it an object

of lucre and speculation.”

This report provoked long debates, but in May, 1826, the Academy

appointed a commission which comprised the following illustrious

names: Leroux, Bourdois de la Motte, Double, Magendie, Guersant,

Husson, Thillaye, Marc, Itard, Fouquier, and Guénau de Mussy. They

began their labors immediately, and continued them five years,

communicating, through Monsieur Husson, to the Academy the results

of their observations. The report embraces accounts of phenomena

classified under thirty-four different paragraphs, but as this work is

not specially devoted to the science of magnetism, we must be content

with a few brief extracts. They assert that neither contact of the

hands, frictions, nor passes are invariably needed, since, on several

occasions, the will, fixedness of stare, have sufficed to produce

magnetic phenomena, even without the knowledge of the magnetized.

“Well-attested and therapeutical phenomena” depend on magnetism alone,

and are not reproduced without it. The state of somnambulism exists

and “occasions the development of new faculties, which have received

the denominations of _clairvoyance_, intuition, internal prevision.”

Sleep (the magnetic) has “been excited under circumstances where those

magnetized could not see, and were entirely ignorant of the means

employed to occasion it. The magnetizer, having once controlled his

subject, may “put him completely into somnambulism, take him out of

it without his knowledge, out of his sight, at a certain distance,

and through closed doors.” The external senses of the sleeper seem {175}

to be completely paralyzed, and a duplicate set to be brought into

action. “Most of the time they are entirely strangers to the external

and unexpected noise made in their ears, such as the sound of copper

vessels, forcibly struck, the fall of any heavy substance, and so

forth.... One may make them respire hydrochloric acid or ammonia

without inconveniencing them by it, or without even a suspicion on

their part.” The committee could “tickle their feet, nostrils, and the

angles of the eyes by the approach of a feather, pinch their skin so

as to produce ecchymosis, prick it under the nails with pins plunged

to a considerable depth, without the evincing of any pain, or by sign

of being at all aware of it.” In a word, we have seen one person who

was insensible to one of the most painful operations of surgery, and

whose countenance, pulse, or respiration did not manifest the slightest

emotion.”

So much for the external senses; now let us see what they have to say

about the internal ones, which may fairly be considered as proving a

marked difference between man and a mutton-protoplasm. “Whilst they

are in this state of somnambulism,” say the committee, “the magnetized

persons we have observed, retain the exercise of the faculties which

they have whilst awake. Their memory even appears to be more faithful

and more extensive.... We have seen two somnambulists distinguish,

with their eyes shut, the objects placed before them; they have told,

without touching them, the color and value of the cards; they have

read words traced with the hand, or some lines of books opened by

mere chance. This phenomenon took place, even when the opening of the

eyelids was accurately closed, by means of the fingers. We met, in two

somnambulists, the power of foreseeing acts more or less complicated of

the organism. One of them announced several days, nay, several months

beforehand, the day, the hour, and the minute when epileptic fits would

come on and return; the other declared the time of the cure. Their

previsions were realized with remarkable exactness.”

The commission say that “it has collected and communicated facts

sufficiently important to induce it to think that the Academy should

encourage the researches on magnetism as a very curious branch of

psychology and natural history.” The committee conclude by saying that

the facts _are so extraordinary_ that they scarcely imagine that the

Academy will concede their reality, but protest that they have been

throughout animated by motives of a lofty character, “the love of

science and by the necessity of justifying the hopes which the Academy

had entertained of our zeal and our devotion.”

Their fears were fully justified by the conduct of at least one

member of their own number, who had absented himself from the

experiments, and, as M. Husson tells us, “did not deem it right to {176}

sign the report.” This was Magendie, the physiologist, who, despite

the fact stated by the official report that he had not “been present

at the experiments,” did not hesitate to devote four pages of his

famous work on _Human Physiology_ to the subject of mesmerism, and

after summarizing its alleged phenomena, without endorsing them as

unreservedly as the erudition and scientific acquirements of his fellow

committee-men would seem to have exacted, says: “Self-respect and the

dignity of the profession demand circumspection on these points. He

(the well-informed physician) will remember how readily mystery glides

into charlatanry, and how apt the profession is to become degraded even

by its semblance when countenanced by respectable practitioners.” No

word in the context lets his readers into the secret that he had been

duly appointed by the Academy to serve on the commission of 1826; had

absented himself from its sittings; had so failed to learn the truth

about mesmeric phenomena, and was now pronouncing judgment ex parte.

“Self-respect and the dignity of the profession” probably exacted

silence!

Thirty-eight years later, an English scientist, whose specialty is

the investigation of physics, and whose reputation is even greater

than that of Magendie, stooped to as unfair a course of conduct. When

the opportunity offered to investigate the spiritualistic phenomena,

and aid in taking it out of the hands of ignorant or dishonest

investigators, Professor John Tyndall avoided the subject; but in his

_Fragments of Science_, he was guilty of the ungentlemanly expressions

which we have quoted in another place.

But we are wrong; he made one attempt, and that sufficed. He tells

us, in the _Fragments_, that he once got under a table, to see how

the raps were made, and arose with a despair for humanity, such as he

never felt before! Israel Putnam, crawling on hand and knee to kill the

she-wolf in her den, partially affords a parallel by which to estimate

the chemist’s courage in groping in the dark after the ugly truth; but

Putnam killed his wolf, and Tyndall was devoured by his! “_Sub mensa

desperatio_” should be the motto on his shield.

Speaking of the report of the committee of 1824, Dr. Alphonse Teste, a

distinguished contemporaneous scientist, says that it produced a great

impression on the Academy, but few convictions: “No one could question

the veracity of the commissioners, whose good faith as well as great

knowledge were undeniable, but they were suspected of having been

dupes. In fact, _there are certain unfortunate truths which compromise

those who believe in them, and those especially who are so candid as

to avow them publicly_.” How true this is, let the records of history,

from the earliest times to this very day, attest. When Professor

Robert Hare announced the preliminary results of his spiritualistic {177}

investigations, he, albeit one of the most eminent chemists and

physicists in the world, was, nevertheless, regarded as a dupe. When he

proved that he was not, he was charged with having fallen into dotage;

the Harvard professors denouncing “his insane adherence to the gigantic

humbug.”

When the professor began his investigations in 1853, he announced that

he “felt called upon, as an act of duty to his fellow-creatures, to

bring whatever influence he possessed to the attempt to stem the tide

of popular madness, which, in defiance of reason and science, was fast

setting in favor of the _gross delusion_ called Spiritualism.” Though,

according to his declaration, he “entirely coincided with Faraday’s

theory of table-turning,” he had the true greatness which characterizes

the princes of science to make his investigation thorough, and then

tell the truth. How he was rewarded by his life-long associates, let

his own words tell. In an address delivered in New York, in September,

1854, he says that “he had been engaged in scientific pursuits for

upwards of half a century, and his accuracy and precision had never

been questioned, until he had become a spiritualist; while his

integrity as a man had never in his life been assailed, until the

Harvard professors fulminated their report against that which _he knew_

to be true, and which they _did not know_ to be false.”

How much mournful pathos is expressed in these few words! An old man

of seventy-six—a scientist of half a century, deserted for telling the

truth! And now Mr. A. R. Wallace, who had previously been esteemed

among the most illustrious of British scientists, having proclaimed

his belief in spiritualism and mesmerism, is spoken of in terms of

compassion. Professor Nicholas Wagner, of St. Petersburg, whose

reputation as a zöologist is one of the most conspicuous, in his turn

pays the penalty of his exceptional candor, in his outrageous treatment

by the Russian scientists!

There are scientists and _scientists_; and if the occult sciences

suffer in the instance of modern spiritualism from the malice of one

class, nevertheless, they have had their defenders at all times among

men whose names have shed lustre upon science itself. In the first

rank stands Isaac Newton, “the light of science,” who was a thorough

believer in magnetism, as taught by Paracelsus, Van Helmont, and by

the fire-philosophers in general. No one will presume to deny that

his doctrine of universal space and attraction is purely a theory of

magnetism. If his own words mean anything at all, they mean that he

based all his speculations upon the “soul of the world,” the great

universal, magnetic agent, which he called the _divine sensorium_.[303] {178}

“Here,” he says, “the question is of a very subtile spirit which

penetrates through all, even the hardest bodies, and which is concealed

in their substance. Through the strength and activity of this

spirit, bodies attract each other, and adhere together when brought

into contact. Through it, electrical bodies operate at the remotest

distance, as well as near at hand, attracting and repelling; through

this spirit the light also flows, and is refracted and reflected, and

warms bodies. All senses are excited by this spirit, and through it the

animals move their limbs. But these things cannot be explained in few

words, and we have not yet sufficient experience to determine fully the

laws by which this universal spirit operates.”

There are two kinds of magnetization; the first is purely _animal_,

the other transcendent, and depending on the will and knowledge of the

mesmerizer, as well as on the degree of spirituality of the subject,

and his capacity to receive the impressions of the astral light. But

now it is next to ascertain that clairvoyance depends a great deal more

on the former than on the latter. To the power of an adept, like Du

Potet, the most _positive_ subject will have to submit. If his sight

is ably directed by the mesmerizer, magician, or spirit, the light

must yield up its most secret records to our scrutiny; for, if it is a

book which is ever closed to those “who see and do not perceive,” on

the other hand it is ever opened for one who _wills_ to see it opened.

It keeps an unmutilated record of all that was, that is, or ever will

be. The minutest acts of our lives are imprinted on it, and even our

thoughts rest photographed on its eternal tablets. It is the book which

we see opened by the angel in the _Revelation_, “which is the Book of

life, and out of which the dead are judged according to their works.”

It is, in short, the MEMORY of GOD!

“The oracles assert that the impression of thoughts, characters, men,

and other divine visions, appear in the æther.... In this the things

without figure are figured,” says an ancient fragment of the _Chaldean

Oracles_ of Zoroaster.[304]

Thus, ancient as well as modern wisdom, vaticination and science,

agree in corroborating the claims of the kabalists. It is on the

indestructible tablets of the astral light that is stamped the

impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform; and

that future events—effects of long-forgotten causes—are already

delineated as a vivid picture for the eye of the seer and prophet

to follow. Memory—the despair of the materialist, the enigma of

the psychologist, the sphinx of science—is to the student of

old philosophies merely a name to express that power which man {179}

unconsciously exerts, and shares with many of the inferior animals—to

look with inner sight into the astral light, and there behold the

images of past sensations and incidents. Instead of searching the

cerebral ganglia for “micrographs of the living and the dead, of scenes

that we have visited, of incidents in which we have borne a part,”[305]

they went to the vast repository where the records of every man’s life

as well as every pulsation of the visible cosmos are stored up for all

Eternity!

That flash of memory which is traditionally supposed to show a drowning

man every long-forgotten scene of his mortal life—as the landscape

is revealed to the traveller by intermittent flashes of lightning—is

simply the sudden glimpse which the struggling soul gets into the

silent galleries where his history is depicted in imperishable colors.

The well-known fact—one corroborated by the personal experience of

nine persons out of ten—that we often recognize as familiar to us,

scenes, and landscapes, and conversations, which we see or hear for

the first time, and sometimes in countries never visited before, is a

result of the same causes. Believers in reïncarnation adduce this as

an additional proof of our antecedent existence in other bodies. This

recognition of men, countries, and things that we have never seen, is

attributed by them to flashes of soul-memory of anterior experiences.

But the men of old, in common with mediæval philosophers, firmly held

to a contrary opinion.

They affirmed that though this psychological phenomenon was one of the

greatest arguments in favor of immortality and the soul’s preëxistence,

yet the latter being endowed with an individual memory apart from that

of our physical brain, it is no proof of reïncarnation. As Eliphas Levi

beautifully expresses it, “nature shuts the door after everything that

passes, and pushes life onward” in more perfected forms. The chrysalis

becomes a butterfly; the latter can never become again a grub. In the

stillness of the night-hours, when our bodily senses are fast locked

in the fetters of sleep, and our elementary body rests, the astral

form becomes free. It then _oozes_ out of its earthly prison, and as

Paracelsus has it—“confabulates with the outward world,” and travels

round the visible as well as the invisible worlds. “In sleep,” he

says, “the astral body (soul) is in freer motion; then it soars to

its parents, and holds converse with the stars.” Dreams, forebodings,

prescience, prognostications and presentiments are impressions left

by our astral spirit on our brain, which receives them more or less

distinctly, according to the proportion of blood with which it is

supplied during the hours of sleep. The more the body is exhausted, the

freer is the spiritual man, and the more vivid the impressions of our

soul’s memory. In heavy and robust sleep, dreamless and uninterrupted, {180}

upon awakening to outward consciousness, men may sometimes remember

nothing. But the impressions of scenes and landscapes which the astral

body saw in its peregrinations are still there, though lying latent

under the pressure of matter. They may be awakened at any moment,

and then, during such flashes of man’s inner memory, there is an

instantaneous interchange of energies between the visible and the

invisible universes. Between the “micrographs” of the cerebral ganglia

and the photo-scenographic galleries of the astral light, a current is

established. And a man who knows that he has never visited in body,

nor seen the landscape and person that he recognizes may well assert

that still has he seen and knows them, for the acquaintance was formed

while travelling in “spirit.” To this the physiologists can have but

one objection. They will answer that in natural sleep—perfect and

deep, “half of our nature which is volitional is in the condition of

inertia;” hence unable to travel; the more so as the existence of any

such individual astral body or soul is considered by them little else

than a poetical myth. Blumenbach assures us that in the state of sleep,

all intercourse between mind and body is suspended; an assertion which

is denied by Dr. Richardson, F. R. S., who honestly reminds the German

scientist that “the precise limits and connections of mind and body

being unknown” it is more than should be said. This confession, added

to those of the French physiologist, Fournié, and the still more recent

one of Dr. Allchin, an eminent London physician, who frankly avowed,

in an address to students, that “of all scientific pursuits which

practically concern the community, there is none perhaps which rests

upon so uncertain and insecure a basis as medicine,” gives us a certain

right to offset the hypotheses of ancient scientists against those of

the modern ones.

No man, however gross and material he may be, can avoid leading a

double existence; one in the visible universe, the other in the

invisible. The life-principle which animates his physical frame is

chiefly in the astral body; and while the more animal portions of

him rest, the more spiritual ones know neither limits nor obstacles.

We are perfectly aware that many learned, as well as the unlearned,

will object to such a novel theory of the distribution of the

life-principle. They would prefer remaining in blissful ignorance and

go on confessing that no one knows or can pretend to tell whence and

whither this mysterious agent appears and disappears, than to give one

moment’s attention to what they consider old and exploded theories.

Some might object on the ground taken by theology, that dumb brutes

have no immortal souls, and hence, can have no astral spirits; for

_theologians as well as laymen labor under the erroneous impression

that soul and spirit are one and the same thing_. But if we study {181}

Plato and other philosophers of old, we may readily perceive that while

the “_irrational_ soul,” by which Plato meant our astral body, or the

more ethereal representation of ourselves, can have at best only a more

or less prolonged continuity of existence beyond the grave; the divine

spirit—wrongly termed _soul_, by the Church—is immortal by its very

essence. (Any Hebrew scholar will readily appreciate the distinction

who comprehends the difference between the two words רוח _ruah_ and נפש

_nephesh_.) If the life-principle is something apart from the astral

spirit and in no way connected with it, why is it that the intensity of

the clairvoyant powers depends so much on the bodily prostration of the

subject? The deeper the trance, the less signs of life the body shows,

the clearer become the spiritual perceptions, and the more powerful are

the soul’s visions. The soul, disburdened of the bodily senses, shows

activity of power in a far greater degree of intensity than it can in a

strong, healthy body. Brierre de Boismont gives repeated instances of

this fact. The organs of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing are

proved to become far acuter in a mesmerized subject deprived of the

possibility of exercising them bodily, than while he uses them in his

normal state.

Such facts alone, once proved, ought to stand as invincible

demonstrations of the continuity of individual life, at least for a

certain period after the body has been left by us, either by reason

of its being worn out or by accident. But though during its brief

sojourn on earth our soul may be assimilated to a light hidden

under a bushel, it still shines more or less bright and attracts

to itself the influences of kindred spirits; and when a thought

of good or evil import is begotten in our brain, it draws to it

_impulses_ of like nature as irresistibly as the magnet attracts

iron filings. This attraction is also proportionate to the intensity

with which the thought-impulse makes itself felt in the ether; and

so it will be understood how one man may impress himself upon his

own epoch so forcibly, that the influence may be carried—through the

ever-interchanging currents of energy between the two worlds, the

visible and the invisible—from one succeeding age to another, until it

affects a large portion of mankind.

How much the authors of the famous work entitled the _Unseen Universe_

may have allowed themselves to think in this direction, it would be

difficult to say; but that they have not told _all_ they might will be

inferred from the following language:

“Regard it as you please, there can be no doubt that the properties of

the ether are of a much higher order in the arena of nature _than those

of tangible matter_. And, as even the high priests of science still

find the latter _far beyond_ their comprehension, except in numerous {182}

but minute and often isolated particulars, it would not become us to

speculate further. It is sufficient for our purpose to know from what

the ether certainly does, that _it is capable of vastly more than any

has yet ventured to say_.”

One of the most interesting discoveries of modern times, is that of the

faculty which enables a certain class of sensitive persons to receive

from any object held in the hand or against the forehead impressions

of the character or appearance of the individual, or any other object

with which it has previously been in contact. Thus a manuscript,

painting, article of clothing, or jewelry—no matter how ancient—conveys

to the sensitive, a vivid picture of the writer, painter, or wearer;

even though he lived in the days of Ptolemy or Enoch. Nay, more; a

fragment of an ancient building will recall its history and even the

scenes which transpired within or about it. A bit of ore will carry

the soul-vision back to the time when it was in process of formation.

This faculty is called by its discoverer—Professor J. R. Buchanan,

of Louisville, Kentucky—_psychometry_. To him, the world is indebted

for this most important addition to Psychological Sciences; and to

him, perhaps, when skepticism is found felled to the ground by such

accumulation of facts, posterity will have to elevate a statue. In

announcing to the public his great discovery, Professor Buchanan,

confining himself to the power of psychometry to delineate human

character, says: “The mental and physiological influence imparted to

writing appears to be imperishable, as the oldest specimens I have

investigated gave their impressions with a distinctness and force,

little impaired by time. Old manuscripts, requiring an antiquary to

decipher their strange old penmanship, were easily interpreted by the

psychometric power.... The property of retaining the impress of mind

is not limited to writing. Drawings, paintings, everything upon which

human contact, thought, and volition have been expended, may become

linked with that thought and life, so as to recall them to the mind of

another when in contact.”

Without, perhaps, really knowing, at the early time of the grand

discovery, the significance of his own prophetic words, the Professor

adds: “This discovery, in its application to the arts and to history,

will open a mine of interesting knowledge.”[306]

The existence of this faculty was first experimentally demonstrated

in 1841. It has since been verified by a thousand psychometers in

different parts of the world. It proves that every occurrence in

nature—no matter how minute or unimportant—leaves its indelible impress

upon physical nature; and, as there has been no appreciable molecular {183}

disturbance, the only inference possible is, that these images have

been produced by that invisible, universal force—Ether, or astral light.

In his charming work, entitled _The Soul of Things_, Professor Denton

the geologist,[307] enters at great length into a discussion of this

subject. He gives a multitude of examples of the psychometrical power,

which Mrs. Denton possesses in a marked degree. A fragment of Cicero’s

house, at Tusculum, enabled her to describe, without the slightest

intimation as to the nature of the object placed on her forehead, not

only the great orator’s surroundings, but also the previous owner of

the building, Cornelius Sulla Felix, or, as he is usually called, Sulla

the Dictator. A fragment of marble from the ancient Christian Church of

Smyrna, brought before her its congregation and officiating priests.

Specimens from Nineveh, China, Jerusalem, Greece, Ararat, and other

places all over the world brought up scenes in the life of various

personages, whose ashes had been scattered thousands of years ago.

In many cases Professor Denton verified the statements by reference

to historical records. More than this, a bit of the skeleton, or a

fragment of the tooth of some antediluvian animal, caused the seeress

to perceive the creature as it was when alive, and even live for a

few brief moments its life, and experience its sensations. Before the

eager quest of the psychometer, the most hidden recesses of the domain

of nature yield up their secrets; and the events of the most remote

epochs rival in vividness of impression the flitting circumstances of

yesterday.

Says the author, in the same work: “Not a leaf waves, not an insect

crawls, not a ripple moves, but each motion is recorded by a thousand

faithful scribes in infallible and indelible scripture. This is just as

true of all past time. From the dawn of light upon this infant globe,

when round its cradle the steamy curtains hung, to this moment, nature

has been busy photographing everything. What a picture-gallery is hers!”

It appears to us the height of impossibility to imagine that scenes

in ancient Thebes, or in some temple of prehistoric times should be

photographed only upon the substance of certain atoms. The images

of the events are imbedded in that all-permeating, universal, and

ever-retaining medium, which the philosophers call the “Soul of the

World,” and Mr. Denton “the Soul of Things.” The psychometer, by

applying the fragment of a substance to his forehead, brings his

_inner-self_ into relations with the inner soul of the object he

handles. It is now admitted that the universal æther pervades all

things in nature, even the most solid. It is beginning to be admitted, {184}

also, that this preserves the images of all things which transpire.

When the psychometer examines his specimen, he is brought in contact

with the current of the astral light, connected with that specimen,

and which retains pictures of the events associated with its history.

These, according to Denton, pass before his vision with the swiftness

of light; scene after scene crowding upon each other so rapidly, that

it is only by the supreme exercise of the will that he is able to hold

any one in the field of vision long enough to describe it.

The psychometer is clairvoyant; that is, he sees with the inner

eye. Unless his will-power is very strong, unless he has thoroughly

trained himself to that particular phenomenon, and his knowledge of

the capabilities of his sight are profound, his perceptions of places,

persons, and events, must necessarily be very confused. But in the case

of mesmerization, in which this same clairvoyant faculty is developed,

the operator, whose will holds that of the subject under control, can

force him to concentrate his attention upon a given picture long enough

to observe all its minute details. Moreover, under the guidance of an

experienced mesmerizer, the seer would excel the natural psychometer in

having a prevision of future events, more distinct and clear than the

latter. And to those who might object to the possibility of perceiving

that which “yet is not,” we may put the question: Why is it more

impossible to see that which will be, than to bring back to sight that

which is gone, and is no more? According to the kabalistic doctrine,

the future exists in the astral light in embryo, as the present existed

in embryo in the past. While man is free to act as he pleases, the

manner in which he _will_ act was foreknown from all time; not on

the ground of fatalism or destiny, but simply on the principle of

universal, unchangeable harmony; and, as it may be foreknown that, when

a musical note is struck, its vibrations will not, and cannot change

into those of another note. Besides, eternity can have neither past

nor future, but only the present; as boundless space, in its strictly

literal sense, can have neither distant nor proximate places. Our

conceptions, limited to the narrow area of our experience, attempt to

fit if not an end, at least a beginning of time and space; but neither

of these exist in reality; for in such case time would not be eternal,

nor space boundless. The past no more exists than the future, as we

have said, only our memories survive; and our memories are but the

glimpses that we catch of the reflections of this past in the currents

of the astral light, as the psychometer catches them from the astral

emanations of the object held by him.

Says Professor E. Hitchcock, when speaking of the influences of light

upon bodies, and of the formation of pictures upon them by means of

it: “It seems, then, that this photographic influence pervades all

nature; nor can we say where it stops. We do not know but it may {185}

imprint upon the world around us our features, as they are modified by

various passions, and thus fill nature with daguerreotype impressions

of all our actions; ... it may be, too, that there are tests by which

nature, more skilful than any photographist, can bring out and fix

these portraits, so that _acuter_ senses than ours shall see them as

on a great canvas, spread over the material universe. _Perhaps_, too,

they may never fade from that canvas, but become specimens in the great

picture-gallery of eternity.”[308]

The “perhaps” of Professor Hitchcock is henceforth changed by the

demonstration of psychometry into a triumphant certitude. Those who

understand these psychological and clairvoyant faculties will take

exception to Professor Hitchcock’s idea, that acuter senses than ours

are needed to see these pictures upon his supposed cosmic canvas, and

maintain that he should have confined his limitations to the external

senses of the body. _The human spirit, being of the Divine, immortal

Spirit, appreciates neither past nor future, but sees all things as in

the present._ These daguerreotypes referred to in the above quotation

are imprinted upon the astral light, where, as we said before—and,

according to the Hermetic teaching, the first portion of which is

already accepted and demonstrated by science—is kept the record of all

that was, is, or ever will be.

Of late, some of our learned men have given a particular attention

to a subject hitherto branded with the mark of “superstition.” They

begin speculating on hypothetical and invisible worlds. The authors

of the _Unseen Universe_ were the first to boldly take the lead, and

already they find a follower in Professor Fiske, whose speculations

are given in the _Unseen World_. Evidently the scientists are probing

the insecure ground of materialism, and, feeling it trembling under

their feet, are preparing for a less dishonorable surrender of arms in

case of defeat. Jevons confirms Babbage, and both firmly believe that

every thought, displacing the particles of the brain and setting them

in motion, scatters them throughout the universe, and think that “each

particle of the existing matter must be a register of all that has

happened.”[309] On the other hand, Dr. Thomas Young, in his lectures

on natural philosophy, most positively invites us to “speculate with

freedom on the possibility of independent worlds; some existing in

different parts, others _pervading each other, unseen and unknown_, in

the same space, and others again to which space may not be a necessary

mode of existence.”

If scientists, proceeding from a strictly scientific point of

view, such as the possibility of energy being transferred into the

invisible universe—and on the principle of continuity, indulge in such

speculations, why should occultists and spiritualists be refused the {186}

same privilege? Ganglionic impressions on the surface of polished

metal, are registered and may be preserved for an indefinite space

of time, according to science; and Professor Draper illustrates the

fact most poetically. “A shadow,” says he, “never falls upon a wall

without leaving thereupon a permanent trace, a trace which might be

made visible by resorting to proper processes.... The portraits of our

friends, or landscape-views, may be hidden on the sensitive surface

from the eye, but they are ready to make their appearance, as soon as

proper developers are resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver

or glassy surface, until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth

into the visible world. Upon the walls of our most private apartments,

where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out, and our

retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of all our

acts, silhouettes of whatever we have done.”[310]

If an indelible impression may be thus obtained on inorganic matter,

and if nothing is lost or passes completely out of existence in the

universe, why such a scientific levee of arms against the authors

of the _Unseen Universe_? And on what ground can they reject the

hypothesis that “_Thought, conceived to affect the matter of another

universe simultaneously with this, may explain a future state_?”[311]

In our opinion, if psychometry is one of the grandest proofs of the

indestructibility of matter, retaining eternally the impressions of

the outward world, the possession of that faculty by our inner sight

is a still greater one in favor of the immortality of man’s individual

spirit. Capable of discerning events which took place hundreds of

thousands of years ago, why would it not apply the same faculty to a

future lost in the eternity, in which there can be neither past nor

future, but only one boundless present?

Notwithstanding the confessions of stupendous ignorance in some things,

made by the scientists themselves, they still deny the existence of

that mysterious spiritual force, lying beyond the grasp of the ordinary

physical laws. They still hope to be able to apply to living beings the

same laws which they have found to answer in reference to dead matter.

And, having discovered what the kabalists term “the gross purgations”

of Ether—light, heat, electricity, and motion—they have rejoiced over

their good fortune, counted its vibrations in producing the colors

of the spectrum; and, proud of their achievements, refuse to see any

further. Several men of science have pondered more or less over its

protean essence, and unable to measure it with their photometers,

called it “an _hypothetical_ medium of great elasticity and extreme {187}

tenuity, _supposed_ to pervade all space, the interior of solid bodies

not excepted;” and, “to be the medium of transmission of light and

heat” (Dictionary). Others, whom we will name “the will-o’-the-wisps”

of science—her pseudo-sons—examined it also, and even went to the

trouble of scrutinizing it “through powerful glasses,” they tell us.

But perceiving neither spirits nor ghosts in it, and failing equally

to discover in its treacherous waves anything of a more scientific

character, they turned round and called all believers in immortality in

general, and spiritualists in particular, “insane fools” and “visionary

lunatics;”[312] the whole, in doleful accents, perfectly appropriate to

the circumstance of such a sad failure.

Say the authors of the _Unseen Universe_:

“We have driven the operation of that mystery called _Life_ out of

the objective universe. The mistake made, lies in imagining that by

this process they completely get rid of a thing so driven before them,

and that it disappears from the universe altogether. It does no such

thing. It only disappears from that _small circle_ of light which we

may call the universe of _scientific perception_. Call it the trinity

of mystery: mystery of matter, the mystery of life and—the mystery of

God—and these three are _One_.”[313]

Taking the ground that “the visible universe must _certainly, in

transformable energy, and probably in matter_, come to an end,” and

“the principle of continuity ... still demanding a continuance of the

universe...” the authors of this remarkable work find themselves forced

to believe “that there is something _beyond_ that which is visible[314]

... and that the visible system is not the whole universe but only, it

may be, a very small part of it.” Furthermore, looking back as well

as forward to the origin of this visible universe, the authors urge

that “if the visible universe is _all_ that exists then the first

abrupt manifestation of it is as truly a break of continuity as its

final overthrow” (Art. 85). Therefore, as such a break is against

the accepted law of continuity, the authors come to the following

conclusion:—

“Now, is it not natural to imagine, that a universe of this nature,

_which we have reason to think exists_, and is connected by bonds of

energy with the visible universe, is also capable of receiving energy

from it?... May we not regard Ether, or the medium, as not merely a {188}

bridge[315] between one order of things and another, forming as it

were a species of cement, in virtue of which the various orders of

the universe are welded together and made into one? In fine, what we

generally called Ether, may be not a mere medium, but a medium _plus_

the invisible order of things, so that when the motions of the visible

universe are transferred into Ether, part of them are conveyed as by

a _bridge_ into the invisible universe, and are there made use of and

stored up. Nay, is it even necessary to retain the conception of a

bridge? May we not at once say that when energy is carried from matter

into Ether, it is carried from the visible into the invisible; and

that when it is carried from Ether to matter it is carried from the

invisible into the visible?“(Art. 198, _Unseen Universe_.)

Precisely; and were Science to take a few more steps in that direction

and fathom more seriously the “hypothetical medium” who knows but

Tyndall’s impassable chasm between the physical processes of the brain

and _consciousness_, might be—at least intellectually—passed with

surprising ease and safety.

So far back as 1856, a man considered a savant in his days—Dr. Jobard

of Paris,—had certainly the same ideas as the authors of the _Unseen

Universe_, on ether, when he startled the press and the world of

science by the following declaration: “I hold a discovery which

frightens me. There are two kinds of electricity; one, brute and blind,

is produced by the contact of metals and acids;” (the gross purgation)

... “the other is intelligent and CLAIRVOYANT!... Electricity has

bifurcated itself in the hands of Galvani, Nobili, and Matteuci. The

brute force of the current has followed Jacobi, Bonelli, and Moncal,

while the intellectual one was following Bois-Robert, Thilorier, and

the Chevalier Duplanty. The electric ball or globular electricity

contains a thought which disobeys Newton and Mariotte to follow its own

freaks.... We have, in the annals of the Academy, thousands of proofs

_of the_ INTELLIGENCE _of the electric bolt_.... But I remark that I

am permitting myself to become indiscreet. A little more and _I should

have disclosed_ to you the key which is about to discover to us the

universal spirit.”[316]

The foregoing, added to the wonderful confessions of science and what

we have just quoted from the _Unseen Universe_, throw an additional

lustre on the wisdom of the long departed ages. In one of the preceding

chapters we have alluded to a quotation from Cory’s translation of

_Ancient Fragments_, in which it appears that one of the _Chaldean

Oracles_ expresses this self-same idea about ether, and in language {189}

singularly like that of the authors of the _Unseen Universe_. It

states that from æther have come all things, and to it all will

return; that the images of all things are indelibly impressed upon it;

and that it is the storehouse of the germs or of the remains of all

visible forms, and even ideas. It appears as if this case strangely

corroborates our assertion that whatever discoveries may be made in our

days will be found to have been anticipated by many thousand years by

our “simple-minded ancestors.”

At the point at which we are now arrived, the attitude assumed by the

materialists toward psychical phenomena being perfectly defined, we may

assert with safety that were this key lying loose on the threshold of

the “chasm” not one of our Tyndalls would stoop to pick it up.

How timid would appear to some kabalists these tentative efforts to

solve the GREAT MYSTERY of the universal ether! Although so far in

advance of anything propounded by contemporary philosophers, what the

intelligent explorers of the _Unseen Universe_ speculate upon, was to

the masters of hermetic philosophy familiar science. To them ether

was not merely a bridge connecting the seen and unseen sides of the

universe, but across its span their daring feet followed the road that

led through the mysterious gates which modern speculators either will

not or _cannot_ unlock.

The deeper the research of the modern explorer, the more often he

comes face to face with the discoveries of the ancients. Does Elie

de Beaumont, the great French geologist, venture a hint upon the

terrestrial circulation, in relation to some elements in the earth’s

crust, he finds himself anticipated by the old philosophers. Do we

demand of distinguished technologists, what are the most recent

discoveries in regard to the origin of the metalliferous deposits?

We hear one of them, Professor Sterry Hunt, in showing us how water

is a _universal solvent_, enunciating the doctrine held and taught

by the old Thales, more than two dozen centuries ago, that water was

the principle of all things. We listen to the same professor, with de

Beaumont as authority, expounding the terrestrial circulation, and

the chemical and physical phenomena of the material world. While we

read with pleasure that he is “not prepared to concede that we have in

chemical and physical processes _the whole secret of organic life_,” we

note with a still greater delight the following honest confession on

his part: “Still we are, in many respects, approximating the phenomena

of the organic world to those of the mineral kingdom; and we at the

same time learn that these so far interest and depend upon each other

that _we begin to see a certain truth_ underlying the notion of those

old philosophers, who extended to the mineral world the notion of a

vital force, which led them to speak of the earth as a great _living_

organism, and to look upon the various changes of its air, its waters,

and its rocky depths, as processes belonging to the life of our

planet.”

Everything in this world must have a beginning. Things have latterly {190}

gone so far with scientists in the matter of prejudice, that it is

quite a wonder that even so much as this should be conceded to ancient

philosophy. The poor, honest primordial elements have long been exiled,

and our ambitious men of science run races to determine who shall add

one more to the fledgling brood of the sixty-three or more elementary

substances. Meanwhile there rages a war in modern chemistry about

terms. We are denied the right to call these substances “chemical

elements,” for they are not “primordial principles or self-existing

essences out of which the universe was fashioned.”[317] Such ideas

associated with the word _element_ were good enough for the “old Greek

philosophy,” but modern science rejects them; for, as Professor Cooke

says, “they are unfortunate terms,” and experimental science will have

“nothing to do with any kind of essences except those which it can see,

smell, or taste.” It must have those that can be put in the eye, the

nose, or the mouth! It leaves others to the metaphysicians.

Therefore, when Van Helmont tells us that, “though a homogeneal part of

elementary earth may be artfully (artificially) converted into water,”

though he still denies “that the same can be done by nature alone;

for no natural agent is able to transmute one element into another,”

offering as a reason that the elements always remain the same, we

must believe him, if not quite an ignoramus, at least an unprogressed

disciple of the mouldy “old Greek philosophy.” Living and dying in

blissful ignorance of the future sixty-three _substances_, what could

either he or his old master, Paracelsus, achieve? Nothing, of course,

but _metaphysical_ and crazy speculations, clothed in a meaningless

jargon common to all mediæval and ancient alchemists. Nevertheless,

in comparing notes, we find in the latest of all works upon modern

chemistry, the following: “The study of chemistry has revealed a

remarkable class of substances, from no one of which a second substance

has ever been produced by any chemical process which weighs less

than the original substance ... by no chemical process whatever can

we obtain from iron a substance weighing less than the metal used in

its production. In a word, we can _extract_ from iron nothing but

iron.”[318] Moreover, it appears, according to Professor Cooke, that

“_seventy-five years ago_ men did not know there was any difference”

between elementary and compound substances, for in old times alchemists

_had never conceived_ “that _weight is the measure of material_, and

that, as thus measured, no material is ever lost; but, on the contrary,

they imagined that in such experiments[319] as these the substances

involved underwent a _mysterious transformation_.... Centuries,” in {191}

short, “were wasted in vain attempts to transform the baser metals

into gold.”

Is Professor Cooke, so eminent in modern chemistry, equally proficient

in the knowledge of what the alchemists did or did not know? Is he

quite sure that he understands the meaning of the alchemical diction?

We are not. But let us compare his views as above expressed with but

sentences written in plain and good, albeit old English, from the

translations of Van Helmont and Paracelsus. We learn from their own

admissions that the alkahest induces the following changes:

“(1.) The alkahest never destroys the _seminal virtues_ of the bodies

thereby dissolved: for instance, gold, by its action, is reduced to

a _salt_ of gold, antimony to _a salt of antimony_, etc., of the

same seminal virtues, or characters with the original concrete. (2.)

The _subject exposed_ to its operation is converted into its three

principles, salt, sulphur, and mercury, and afterwards into salt alone,

which then becomes volatile, and at length is wholly turned into

clear water. (3.) Whatever it dissolves may be rendered volatile by

a sand-heat; and if, after volatilizing the solvent, it be distilled

therefrom, the body is left pure, insipid water, but always _equal in

quantity to its original self_.” Further, we find Van Helmont, the

elder, saying of this salt that it will dissolve the most untractable

bodies into substances of the same seminal virtues, “_equal in weight

to the matter dissolved_;” and he adds, “This salt, by being several

times cohobated with Paracelsus, _sal circulatum_, loses all its

fixedness, and at length becomes an insipid water, _equal in quantity_

to the salt it was made from.”[320]

The objection that might be made by Professor Cooke, in behalf of

modern science, to the hermetic expressions, would equally apply to

the Egyptian hieratic writings—they hide that which was meant to be

concealed. If he would profit by the labors of the past, he must employ

the cryptographer, and not the satirist. Paracelsus, like the rest,

exhausted his ingenuity in transpositions of letters and abbreviations

of words and sentences. For example, when he wrote _sutratur_ he meant

tartar, and _mutrin_ meant nitrum, and so on. There was no end to the

pretended explanations of the meaning of the alkahest. Some imagined

that it was an alkaline of salt of tartar salatilized; others that it

meant _algeist_, a German word which means all-spirit, or spirituous.

Paracelsus usually termed salt “the centre of water wherein metals

ought to die.” This gave rise to the most absurd suppositions, and

some persons—such as Glauber—thought that the alkahest was the spirit

of salt. It requires no little hardihood to assert that Paracelsus and

his colleagues were ignorant of the natures of elementary and compound {192}

substances; they may not be called by the same names as are now in

fashion, but that they were known is proved by the results attained.

What matters it by what name the gas given off when iron is dissolved

in sulphuric acid was called by Paracelsus, since he is recognized,

even by our standard authorities, as the discoverer of _hydrogen_?[321]

His merit is the same; and though Van Helmont may have concealed, under

the name “seminal virtues,” his knowledge of the fact that elementary

substances have their original properties, which the entering into

compounds only temporarily modifies—never destroys—he was none the less

the greatest chemist of his age, and the peer of modern scientists. He

affirmed that the _aurum potabile_ could be obtained with the alkahest,

by converting the whole body of gold into salt, retaining its seminal

virtues, and being soluble in water. When chemists learn what he meant

by _aurum potabile_, alkahest, salt, and seminal virtues—what he really

meant, not what he said he meant, nor what was thought he meant—then,

and not before, can our chemists safely assume such airs toward the

fire-philosophers and those ancient masters whose mystic teachings

they reverently studied. One thing is clear, at any rate. Taken merely

in its exoteric form, this language of Van Helmont shows that he

understood the solubility of metallic substances in water, which Sterry

Hunt makes the basis of his theory of metalliferous deposits. We would

like to see what sort of terms would be invented by our scientific

contempories to conceal and yet half-reveal their audacious proposition

that man’s “only God is the cineritious matter of his brain,” if in the

basement of the new Court House or the cathedral on Fifth Avenue there

were a torture-chamber, to which judge or cardinal could send them at

will.

Professor Sterry Hunt says in one of his lectures:[322] “The alchemists

sought in vain for a universal solvent; but we now know that water,

aided in some cases by heat, pressure, and the presence of certain

widely-distributed substances, such as carbonic acid and alkaline

carbonates and sulphides, will dissolve the most insoluble bodies; so

that it may, after all, be looked upon as the long-sought for alkahest

or universal menstruum.”

This reads almost like a paraphrase of Van Helmont, or Paracelsus

himself! They knew the properties of water as a solvent as well

as modern chemists, and what is more, made no concealment of the

fact; which shows that this was not _their_ universal solvent. Many

commentaries and criticisms of their works are still extant, and one

can hardly take up a book on the subject without finding at least one {193}

of their speculations of which they never thought of making a mystery.

This is what we find in an old work on alchemists—a satire, moreover—of

1820, written at the beginning of our century when the new theories on

the chemical potency of water were hardly in their embryonic state.

“It may throw some light to observe, that Van Helmont, as well as

Paracelsus, _took water for the universal instrument (agent?) of

chymistry_ and natural philosophy; and earth for the unchangeable basis

of all things—that fire was assigned as the sufficient cause of all

things—that seminal impressions were lodged in the mechanism of the

earth—that water, by dissolving and fermenting with this earth, as

it does by means of fire, brings forth everything; whence originally

proceeded animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.”[323]

The alchemists understand well this universal potency of water. In the

works of Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Philalethes, Pantatem, Tachenius, and

even Boyle, “the great characteristic of the alkahest,” “to dissolve

and change all sublunary bodies—_water alone excepted_,” is explicitly

stated. And is it possible to believe that Van Helmont, whose private

character was unimpeachable, and whose great learning was universally

recognized, should most solemnly declare himself possessed of the

secret, were it but a vain boast![324]

In a recent address at Nashville, Tennessee, Professor Huxley laid

down a certain rule with respect to the validity of human testimony

as a basis of history and science, which we are quite ready to

apply to the present case. “It is impossible,” he says, “that one’s

practical life should not be more or less influenced by the views

which we may hold as to what has been the past history of things.

One of them is _human testimony_ in its various shapes—all testimony

of eye-witnesses, traditional testimony from the lips of _those who

have been eye-witnesses_, and the testimony of those who have put

their impressions into writing and into print.... If you read Cæsar’s

_Commentaries_, wherever he gives an account of his battles with the

Gauls, you place a certain amount of confidence in his statements. You

take his testimony upon this. _You feel that Cæsar would not have made

these statements unless he had believed them to be true._”

Now, we cannot in logic permit Mr. Huxley’s philosophical rule to be

applied in a one-sided manner to Cæsar. Either that personage was

naturally truthful or a natural liar; and since Mr. Huxley has settled

that point to his own satisfaction as regards the facts of military

history in his favor, we insist that Cæsar is also a competent witness {194}

as to augurs, diviners, and psychological facts. So with Herodotus,

and all other ancient authorities, unless they were by nature men

of truth, they should not be believed even about civil or military

affairs. _Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus._ And equally, if they are

credible as to physical things, they must be regarded as equally so as

to spiritual things; for as Professor Huxley tells us, human nature was

of old just as it is now. Men of intellect and conscience did not lie

for the pleasure of bewildering or disgusting posterity.

The probabilities of falsification by such men having been defined

so clearly by a man of science, we feel free from the necessity of

discussing the question in connection with the names of Van Helmont

and his illustrious but unfortunate master, the much-slandered

Paracelsus. Deleuze, though finding in the works of the former many

“mythic, illusory ideas” perhaps only because he could not understand

them—credits him nevertheless with a vast knowledge, “an acute

judgment,” and at the same time with having given to the world “great

truths.” “He was the first,” he adds, “to give the name of _gas_ to

aerial fluids. Without him it is probable that steel would have given

no new impulse to science.”[325] By what application of the doctrine

of chances could we discover the likelihood that experimentalists,

capable of resolving and recombining chemical substances, as they

are admitted to have done, were ignorant of the nature of elementary

substances, their combining energies, and the solvent or solvents, that

would disintegrate them when wanted? If they had the reputation only of

theorists the case would stand differently and our argument would lose

its force, but the chemical discoveries grudgingly accorded to them,

by their worst enemies, form the basis for much stronger language than

we have permitted ourselves, from a fear of being deemed over partial.

And, as this work, moreover, is based on the idea that there is a

higher nature of man, that his moral and intellectual faculties should

be judged _psychologically_, we do not hesitate to reaffirm that since

Van Helmont asserted, “most solemnly,” that he was possessed of the

secret of the alkahest, no modern critic has a right to set him down

as either a liar or a visionary, until something more certain is known

about the nature of this alleged _universal menstruum_.

“Facts are stubborn things,” remarks Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his preface

to _Miracles and Modern Spiritualism_. Therefore,[326] as facts must {195}

be our strongest allies, we will bring as many of these forward as

the “miracles” of antiquity and those of our modern times will furnish

us with. The authors of the _Unseen Universe_ have _scientifically_

demonstrated the possibility of certain alleged psychological

phenomena through the medium of the universal ether. Mr. Wallace has

as scientifically proved that the whole catalogue of assumptions to

the contrary, including the sophisms of Hume, are untenable if brought

face to face with strict logic. Mr. Crookes has given to the world

of skepticism his own experiments, which lasted above three years

before he was conquered by the most undeniable of evidence—that of his

own senses. A whole list could be made up of men of science who have

recorded their testimony to that effect; and Camille Flammarion, the

well-known French astronomer, and author of many works which, in the

eyes of the skeptical, should send him to the ranks of the “deluded,”

in company with Wallace, Crookes, and Hare, corroborates our words in

the following lines:

“I do not hesitate to affirm my conviction, based on a personal

examination of the subject, that any scientific man who declares the

phenomena denominated ‘magnetic,’ ‘somnambulic,‘ ‘mediumic,’ and others

not yet explained by science, to be impossible, is one who speaks

without knowing what he is talking about, and also any man accustomed,

by his professional avocations, to scientific observations—provided

that his mind be not biassed by preconceived opinions, nor his mental

vision blinded by that opposite kind of illusion, unhappily too common

in the learned world, which consists in _imagining that the laws of

Nature are already known to us_, and that everything which appears to

overstep the limit of our present formulas is impossible, may require a

radical and absolute certainty of the reality of the facts alluded to.”

In Mr. Crookes’ _Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called

Spiritual_, on p. 101, this gentleman quotes Mr. Sergeant Cox, who

having named this unknown force, _psychic_, explains it thus: “As

the organism is itself moved and directed within the structure by a

force—which either is, or is not controlled by—the soul, spirit, or

mind ... which constitutes the individual being we term ‘the man,’ it

is an equally reasonable conclusion that the force which causes the

motions beyond the limits of the body _is the same force that produces

motion within the limits of the body_. And, as the external force is

often directed by intelligence, it is an equally reasonable conclusion

that the directing intelligence of the external force is the same

intelligence that directs the force internally.”

In order to comprehend this theory the better, we may as well divide it

in four propositions and show that Mr. Sergeant Cox believes:

1. That the force which produces physical phenomena proceeds _from_

(consequently is generated _in_) the medium.

2. That the intelligence directing the force for the production of the {196}

phenomena (_a_) _may_ sometimes be other than the intelligence of the

medium; but of this the “proof” is “insufficient;” therefore, (_b_) the

directing intelligence is probably that of the medium himself. This Mr.

Cox calls “a reasonable conclusion.”

3. He assumes that the force which moves the table is identical with

the force which moves the medium’s body itself.

4. He strongly disputes the spiritualistic theory, or rather assertion,

that “spirits of the dead are the _sole_ agents in the production of

_all_ the phenomena.”

Before we fairly proceed on our analysis of such views we must remind

the reader that we find ourselves placed between two extreme opposites

represented by two parties—the believers and unbelievers in this agency

of human spirits. Neither seem capable of deciding the point raised

by Mr. Cox; for while the spiritualists are so omnivorous in their

credulity as to believe every sound and movement in a _circle_ to be

produced by _disembodied_ human beings, their antagonists dogmatically

deny that anything can be produced by “spirits,” for there are none.

Hence, neither class is in a position to examine the subject without

bias.

If they consider that force which “produces motion within the body” and

the one “which causes the motion beyond the limits of the body” to be

of _the same essence_, they may be right. But the identity of these two

forces stops here. The life-principle which animates Mr. Cox’s body is

of the same nature as that of his medium; nevertheless he is not the

medium, nor is the latter Mr. Cox.

This force, which, to please Mr. Cox and Mr. Crookes we may just as

well call _psychic_ as anything else, proceeds _through_ not _from_ the

individual medium. In the latter case this force would be generated in

the medium and we are ready to show that it cannot be so; neither in

the instances of levitation of human bodies, the moving of furniture

and other objects without contact, nor in such cases in which the force

shows reason and intelligence. It is a well-known fact to both mediums

and spiritualists, that the more the former is passive, the better

the manifestations; and every one of the above-mentioned phenomena

requires a _conscious_ predetermined _will_. In cases of levitation,

we should have to believe that this self-generated force would raise

the inert mass off the ground, direct it through the air, and lower it

down again, avoiding obstacles and thereby showing intelligence, and

still act automatically, the medium remaining all the while _passive_.

If such were the fact, the medium would be a conscious magician, and

all pretence for being a passive instrument in the hands of invisible

intelligences would become useless. As well plead that a quantity of {197}

steam sufficient to fill, without bursting, a boiler, will raise the

boiler; or a Leyden jar, full of electricity, overcome the inertia of

the jar, as such a mechanical absurdity. All analogy would seem to

indicate that the force which operates in the presence of a medium upon

external objects comes from a source back of the medium himself. We may

rather compare it with the hydrogen which overcomes the inertia of the

balloon. The gas, under the control of an intelligence, is accumulated

in the receiver in sufficient volume to overcome the attraction of

its combined mass. On the same principle this force moves articles of

furniture, and performs other manifestations; and though identical

in its essence with the astral spirit of the medium, it cannot be

his spirit only, for the latter remains all the while in a kind of

cataleptic torpor, when the mediumship is genuine. Mr. Cox’s first

point seems, therefore, not well taken; it is based upon an hypothesis

mechanically untenable. Of course our argument proceeds upon the

supposition that levitation is an observed fact. The theory of psychic

force, to be perfect, must account for all “visible motions ... in

solid substances,” and among these is levitation.

As to his second point, we deny that “the proof is insufficient” that

the force which produces the phenomena is sometimes directed by other

intelligences than the mind of the “psychic.” On the contrary there is

such an abundance of testimony to show that the mind of the medium,

in a majority of cases, has nothing to do with the phenomena, that we

cannot be content to let Mr. Cox’s bold assertion go unchallenged.

Equally illogical do we conceive to be his third proposition; for if

the medium’s body be not the generator but simply the channel of the

force which produces the phenomena—a question upon which Mr. Cox’s

researches throw no light whatever—then it does not follow that because

the medium’s “soul, spirit, or mind” directs the medium’s organism,

therefore this “soul, spirit, or mind,” lifts a chair or raps at the

call of the alphabet.

As to the fourth proposition, namely, that “spirits of the dead are

the sole agents in the production of all the phenomena,” we need not

join issue at the present moment, inasmuch as the nature of the spirits

producing mediumistic manifestations is treated at length in other

chapters.

The philosophers, and especially those who were initiated into the

Mysteries, held that the astral soul is the impalpable duplicate of

the gross external form which we call body. It is the _perisprit_

of the Kardecists and the _spirit-form_ of the spiritualists. Above

this internal duplicate, and illuminating it as the warm ray of the {198}

sun illuminates the earth, fructifying the germ and calling out to

spiritual vivification the latent qualities dormant in it, hovers the

divine spirit. The astral _perisprit_ is contained and confined within

the physical body as ether in a bottle, or magnetism in magnetized

iron. It is a centre and engine of force, fed from the universal supply

of force, and moved by the same general laws which pervade all nature

and produce all cosmical phenomena. Its inherent activity causes the

incessant physical operations of the animal organism and ultimately

results in the destruction of the latter by overuse and its own

escape. It is the prisoner, not the voluntary tenant, of the body. It

has an attraction so powerful to the external universal force, that

after wearing out its casing it finally escapes to it. The stronger,

grosser, more material its encasing body, the longer is the term of its

imprisonment. Some persons are born with organizations so exceptional,

that the door which shuts other people in from communication with the

world of the astral light, can be easily unbarred and opened, and their

souls can look into, or even pass into that world, and return again.

Those who do this consciously, and at will, are termed magicians,

hierophants, seers, adepts; those who are made to do it, either through

the fluid of the mesmerizer or of “spirits,” are “mediums.” The astral

soul, when the barriers are once opened, is so powerfully attracted by

the universal, astral magnet, that it sometimes lifts its encasement

with it and keeps it suspended in mid-air, until the gravity of matter

reässerts its supremacy, and the body redescends again to earth.

Every objective manifestation, whether it be the motion of a living

limb, or the movement of some inorganic body, requires two conditions:

will and force—plus _matter_, or that which makes the object so moved

visible to our eye; and these three are all convertible forces, or the

force-correlation of the scientists. In their turn they are directed

or rather overshadowed by the Divine intelligence which these men so

studiously leave out of the account, but without which not even the

crawling of the smallest earth-worm could ever take place. The simplest

as the most common of all natural phenomena,—the rustling of the

leaves which tremble under the gentle contact of the breeze—requires

a constant exercise of these faculties. Scientists may well call them

cosmic laws, immutable and unchangeable. Behind these laws we must

search for the intelligent cause, which once having created and set

these laws in motion, has infused into them the essence of its own

consciousness. Whether we call this the first cause, the universal

will, or God, it must always bear intelligence.

And now we may ask, how can a will manifest itself intelligently and

unconsciously at the same time? It is difficult, if not impossible, to

conceive of intellection apart from consciousness. By consciousness {199}

we do not necessarily imply physical or corporeal consciousness.

_Consciousness is a quality of the sentient principle, or, in other

words, the soul; and the latter often displays activity even while the

body is asleep or paralyzed._ When we lift our arm mechanically, we

may imagine that we do it unconsciously because our superficial senses

cannot appreciate the interval between the formulation of the purpose

and its execution. Latent as it seemed to us, our vigilant will evolved

force, and set our matter in motion. There is nothing in the nature

of the most trivial of mediumistic phenomena to make Mr. Cox’s theory

plausible. If the intelligence manifested by this force is no proof

that it belongs to a disembodied spirit, still less is it evidence that

it is unconsciously given out by the medium; Mr. Crookes himself tells

us of cases where the intelligence could not have emanated from any

one in the room; as in the instance where the word “however,” covered

by his finger and unknown even to himself, was correctly written by

planchette.[327] No explanation whatever can account for this case; the

only hypothesis tenable—if we exclude the agency of a spirit-power—is

that the clairvoyant faculties were brought into play. But scientists

deny clairvoyance; and if, to escape the unwelcome alternative of

accrediting the phenomena to a spiritual source, they concede to us the

fact of clairvoyance, it then devolves upon them to either accept the

kabalistic explanation of what this faculty is, or achieve the task

hitherto impracticable of making a new theory to fit the facts.

Again, if for the sake of argument it should be admitted that Mr.

Crookes’ word “however” might have been clairvoyantly read, what shall

we say of mediumistic communications having a prophetic character? Does

any theory of mediumistic impulse account for the ability to foretell

events beyond the possible knowledge of both speaker and listener? Mr.

Cox will have to try again.

As we have said before, the modern psychic force, and the ancient

oracular fluids, whether terrestrial or sidereal, are identical in

essence—simply a blind force. So is air. And while in a dialogue the

sound-waves produced by a conversation of the speakers affect the same

body of air, that does not imply any doubt of the fact that there

are two persons talking with each other. Is it any more reasonable

to say that when a common agent is employed by medium and “spirit”

to intercommunicate, there must necessarily be but one intelligence

displaying itself? As the air is necessary for the mutual exchange

of audible sounds, so are certain currents of astral light, or ether

directed by an _Intelligence_, necessary for the production of the

phenomena called spiritual. Place two interlocutors in the exhausted {200}

receiver of an air-pump, and, if they could live, their words would

remain inarticulate thoughts, for there would be no air to vibrate, and

hence no ripple of sound would reach their ears. Place the strongest

medium in such isolating atmosphere as a powerful mesmerizer, familiar

with the properties of the magical agent, can create around him, and no

manifestations will take place until some opposing intelligence, more

potential than the will-power of the mesmerizer, overcomes the latter

and terminates the astral inertia.

The ancients were at no loss to discriminate between a blind

force acting spontaneously and the same force when directed by an

intelligence.

Plutarch, the priest of Apollo, when speaking of the oracular vapors

which were but a subterranean gas, imbued with intoxicating magnetic

properties, shows its nature to be dual, when he addresses it in these

words: “And who art thou? without a God who creates and ripens thee;

without a dæmon [spirit] who, acting under the orders of God, directs

and governs thee; thou canst do nothing, thou art _nothing_ but a

vain breath.”[328] Thus without the indwelling soul or intelligence,

“Psychic Force” would be also but a “vain breath.”

Aristotle maintains that this gas, or astral emanation, escaping from

inside the earth, is the sole _sufficient cause_, acting from within

outwardly for the vivification of every living being and plant upon the

external crust. In answer to the skeptical negators of his century,

Cicero, moved by a just wrath, exclaims: “And what can be more divine

than the exhalations of the earth, which affect the human soul so as to

enable her to predict the future? And could the hand of time evaporate

such a virtue? Do you suppose you are talking of some kind of wine or

salted meat?”[329] Do modern experimentalists claim to be wiser than

Cicero, and say that this eternal force has evaporated, and that the

springs of prophecy are dry?

All the prophets of old—inspired sensitives—were said to be uttering

their prophecies under the same conditions, either by the direct

outward efflux of the astral emanation, or a sort of damp fluxion,

rising from the earth. It is this astral matter which serves as a

temporary clothing of the souls who form themselves in this light.

Cornelius Agrippa expresses the same views as to the nature of these

phantoms by describing it as moist or humid: “_In spirito turbido_

HUMIDOQUE.”[330]

Prophecies are delivered in two ways—consciously, by magicians who are

able to look into the astral light; and unconsciously, by those who {201}

act under what is called inspiration. To the latter class belonged

and belong the Biblical prophets and the modern trance-speakers. So

familiar with this fact was Plato, that of such prophets he says: “No

man, when in his senses, attains prophetic truth and inspiration ...

but only when demented by some distemper or possession ...” (by a

daimonion or spirit).[331] “Some persons call them prophets; they do

not know that they are only _repeaters_ ... and are not to be called

prophets at all, but only _transmitters_ of vision and prophecy,“he

adds.

In continuation of his argument, Mr. Cox says: “The most ardent

spiritualists practically admit the existence of psychic force, under

the very inappropriate name of magnetism (to which it has no affinity

whatever), for they assert that the spirits of the dead can only do the

acts attributed to them by using the magnetism (that is, the psychic

force) of the mediums.”[332]

Here, again, a misunderstanding arises in consequence of different

names being applied to what may prove to be one and the same

imponderable compound. Because electricity did not become a science

till the eighteenth century, no one will presume to say that this

force has not existed since the creation; moreover, we are prepared

to prove that even the ancient Hebrews were acquainted with it. But,

merely because exact science did not happen before 1819 to stumble

over the discovery which showed the intimate connection existing

between magnetism and electricity, it does not at all prevent these two

agents being identical. If a bar of iron can be endowed with magnetic

properties, by passing a current of voltaic electricity over some

conductor placed in a certain way close to the bar, why not accept,

as a provisional theory, that a medium may also be a _conductor_,

and nothing more, at a seance? Is it unscientific to say that the

intelligence of “psychic force,” drawing currents of electricity from

the waves of the ether, and employing the medium as a conductor,

develops and calls into action the latent magnetism with which the

atmosphere of the seance-room is saturated, so as to produce the

desired effects? The word _magnetism_ is as appropriate as any other,

until science gives us something more than a merely hypothetical agent

endowed with conjectural properties.

“The difference between the advocates of psychic force and the

spiritualists consists in this,” says Sergeant Cox, “that we contend

that there is as yet insufficient proof of any other directing agent

than the intelligence of the medium, and _no proof whatever_ of the

agency of the ‘spirits’ of the dead.”[333]

We fully agree with Mr. Cox as to the lack of proof that the agency {202}

is that of the spirits of the dead; as for the rest, it is a very

extraordinary deduction from “a wealth of facts,” according to the

expression of Mr. Crookes, who remarks further, “On going over my

notes, I find ... such a superabundance of evidence, so overwhelming

a mass of testimony ... that I could fill several numbers of the

_Quarterly_.”[334]

Now some of these facts of an “overwhelming evidence” are as follows:

1st. The movement of heavy bodies with contact, but without mechanical

exertion. 2d. The phenomena of percussive and other sounds. 3d. The

alteration of weight of bodies. 4th. Movements of heavy substances

_when at a distance from the medium_. 5th. The rising of tables and

chairs off the ground, _without contact with any person_. 6th. THE

LEVITATION OF HUMAN BEINGS.[335] 7th. “Luminous apparitions.” Says

Mr. Crookes, “Under the strictest conditions, I have seen a solid

self-luminous body, the size and nearly the shape of a turkey’s egg,

float noiselessly about the room, at one time higher than any one could

reach on tiptoe, and then gently descend to the floor. It was visible

for more than ten minutes, and before it faded away it struck the

table three times with a sound like that of a hard, solid body.”[336]

(We must infer that the egg was of the same nature as M. Babinet’s

meteor-cat, which is classified with other natural phenomena in Arago’s

works.) 8th. The appearance of hands, either self-luminous or visible

by ordinary light. 9th. “Direct writing” by these same luminous hands,

detached, and evidently endowed with intelligence. (Psychic force?)

10th. “Phantom-forms and faces.” In this instance, the psychic force

comes “from a corner of the room” as a “phantom form,” takes an

accordeon in its hand, and then glides about the room, playing the

instrument; Home, the medium, being in full view at the time.[337] The

whole of the preceding Mr. Crookes witnessed and tested at his own

house, and, having assured himself scientifically of the genuineness of

the phenomenon, reported it to the Royal Society. Was he welcomed as {203}

the discoverer of natural phenomena of a new and important character?

Let the reader consult his work for the answer.

In addition to these freaks played on human credulity by “psychic

force,” Mr. Crookes gives another class of phenomena, which he terms

“special instances,” which _seem_ (?) to point to the agency of an

_exterior_ intelligence.[338]

“I have been,” says Mr. Crookes, “with Miss Fox when she has been

writing a message automatically to one person present, whilst a message

to another person, on _another_ subject, was being given alphabetically

by means of ‘raps,’ and the whole time she was conversing freely with

a third person, on a subject totally different from either.... During

a seance with Mr. Home, a small lath moved across the table to me,

_in the light_, and delivered a message to me by tapping my hand; I

repeating the alphabet, and the lath tapping me at the right letters

... being at a distance from Mr. Home’s hands.” The same lath, upon

request of Mr. Crookes, gave him “a telegraphic message through the

Morse alphabet, by taps on my hand” (the Morse code being quite unknown

to any other person present, and but imperfectly to himself), “and,”

adds Mr. Crookes, “it convinced me that there was a good Morse operator

at the other end of the line, WHEREVER THAT MIGHT BE.”[339] Would it be

undignified in the present case to suggest that Mr. Cox should search

for the operator in his private principality—Psychic Land? But the same

lath does more and better. In full light in Mr. Crookes’ room _it_

is asked to give a message, “ ... a pencil and some sheets of paper

had been lying on the centre of the table; presently the _pencil rose

on its point_, and after advancing by hesitating jerks to the paper,

fell down. It then rose, and again fell.... After three unsuccessful

attempts, a small wooden lath” (the Morse operator) “which was lying

near upon the table, _slid towards the pencil_, and _rose_ a few inches

from the table; the pencil rose again, _and propping itself against the

lath_, the two together made an effort to mark the paper. It fell, and

then _a joint effort_ was made again. After a third trial the lath gave

it up, and _moved back to its place_; the pencil lay as it fell across

the paper, and an alphabetic message told us: “We have tried to do as

you asked, but _our power_ is exhausted.”[340] The word _our_, as the

joint intelligent efforts of the friendly lath and pencil, would make

us think that there were _two_ psychic forces present.

In all this, is there any proof that the directing agent was “the

intelligence of the medium”? Is there not, on the contrary, every

indication that the movements of the lath and pencil were directed

by spirits “of the dead,” or at least of those of some other unseen {204}

intelligent entities? Most certainly the word magnetism explains in

this case as little as the term _psychic force_; howbeit, there is more

reason to use the former than the latter, if it were but for the simple

fact that the _transcendent_ magnetism or mesmerism produces phenomena

identical in effects with those of spiritualism. The phenomenon of the

_enchanted_ circle of Baron Du Potet and Regazzoni, is as contrary

to the accepted laws of physiology as the rising of a table without

contact is to the laws of natural philosophy. As strong men have often

found it impossible to raise a small table weighing a few pounds, and

broken it to pieces in the effort, so a dozen of experimenters, among

them sometimes, academicians, were utterly unable to step across a

chalk-line drawn on the floor by Du Potet. On one occasion a Russian

general, well known for his skepticism, persisted until he fell on the

ground in violent convulsions. In this case, the magnetic fluid which

opposed such a resistance was Mr. Cox’s psychic force, which endows the

tables with an extraordinary and supernatural weight. If they produce

the same psychological and physiological effects, there is good reason

to believe them more or less identical. We do not think the deduction

could be very reasonably objected to. Besides, were the fact even

denied, this is no reason why it should not be so. Once upon a time,

all the Academies in Christendom had agreed to deny that there were

any mountains in the moon; and there was a certain time when, if any

one had been so bold as to affirm that there was life in the superior

regions of the atmosphere as well as in the fathomless depths of the

ocean, he would have been set down as a fool or an ignoramus.

“The Devil affirms—it must be a lie!” the pious Abbé Almiguana used

to say, in a discussion with a “spiritualized table.” We will soon be

warranted in paraphrasing the sentence and making it read—“Scientists

deny—then it must be true.”

CHAPTER VII. {205}

“Thou great First Cause, least understood.”—POPE.

“Whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror

Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul

Back on herself, and startles at destruction?

’Tis the divinity that stirs within us;

’Tis heaven itself that points out our hereafter

And intimates eternity to man.

ETERNITY! Thou pleasing, dreadful thought!”—ADDISON.

“There is another and a better world.”—KOTZEBUE: _The Stranger_.

After according so much space to the conflicting opinions of our men

of science about certain occult phenomena of our modern period, it

is but just that we give attention to the speculations of mediæval

alchemists and certain other illustrious men. Almost without exception,

ancient and mediæval scholars believed in the arcane doctrines of

wisdom. These included Alchemy, the Chaldeo-Jewish Kabala, the esoteric

systems of Pythagoras and the old Magi, and those of the later Platonic

philosophers and theurgists. We also propose in subsequent pages to

treat of the Indian gymnosophists and the Chaldean astrologers. We

must not neglect to show the grand truths underlying the misunderstood

religions of the past. The four elements of our fathers, earth, air,

water, and fire, contain for the student of alchemy and ancient

psychology—or as it is now termed, _magic_—many things of which our

philosophy has never dreamed. We must not forget that what is now

called _Necromancy_ by the Church, and _Spiritualism_ by modern

believers, and that includes the evoking of departed spirits, is a

science which has, from remote antiquity, been almost universally

diffused over the face of the globe.

Although neither an alchemist, magician, nor astrologer, but simply

a great philosopher, Henry More, of Cambridge University—a man

universally esteemed, may be named as a shrewd logician, scientist, and

metaphysician. His belief in witchcraft was firm throughout his life.

His faith in immortality and able arguments in demonstration of the

survival of man’s spirit after death are all based on the Pythagorean

system, adopted by Cardan, Van Helmont, and other mystics. The infinite {206}

and uncreated spirit that we usually call GOD, a substance of the

highest virtue and excellency, produced everything else by _emanative

causality_. God thus is the primary substance, the rest, the secondary;

if the former created matter with a power of moving itself, he, the

primary substance, is still the cause of that motion as well as of the

matter, and yet we rightly say that it is matter which moves itself.

“We may define this kind of spirit we speak of to be a substance

indiscernible, that can move itself, that can penetrate, contract, and

dilate itself, and can also penetrate, move, and alter matter,”[341]

which is the third emanation. He firmly believed in apparitions,

and stoutly defended the theory of the individuality of every soul

in which “personality, memory, and conscience will surely continue

in the future state.” He divided the astral spirit of man after its

exit from the body into two distinct entities: the “aërial” and the

“æthereal vehicle.” During the time that a disembodied man moves in its

aërial clothing, he is subject to _Fate_—_i. e._, evil and temptation,

attached to its earthly interests, and therefore is not utterly pure;

it is only when he casts off this garb of the first spheres and becomes

ethereal that he becomes sure of his immortality. “For what shadow

can that body cast that is a pure and transparent light, such as the

ethereal vehicle is? And therefore that oracle is then fulfilled, when

the soul has ascended into that condition we have already described, in

which alone it is out of the reach of fate and mortality.” He concludes

his work by stating that this transcendent and divinely-pure condition

was the only aim of the Pythagoreans.

As to the skeptics of his age, his language is contemptuous and severe.

Speaking of Scot, Adie, and Webster, he terms them “our new inspired

saints ... sworn advocates of the witches, who thus madly and boldly,

against all sense and reason, against all antiquity, all interpreters,

and against the Scripture itself, will have even no Samuel in the

scene, but a confederate knave! Whether the Scripture, or these inblown

buffoons, puffed up with nothing but ignorance, vanity, and stupid

infidelity, are to be believed, let any one judge,” he adds.[342]

What kind of language would this eminent divine have used against our

skeptics of the nineteenth century?

Descartes, although a worshipper of matter, was one of the most devoted

teachers of the magnetic doctrine and, in a certain sense, even of

Alchemy. His system of physics was very much like that of other great

philosophers. Space, which is infinite, is composed, or rather filled

up with a fluid and elementary matter, and is the sole fountain of all {207}

life, enclosing all the celestial globes and keeping them in perpetual

motion. The magnet-streams of Mesmer are disguised by him into the

Cartesian vortices, and both rest on the same principle. Ennemoser does

not hesitate to say that both have more in common “than people suppose,

who have not carefully examined the subject.”[343]

The esteemed philosopher, Pierre Poiret Naudé, was the warmest defender

of the doctrines of occult magnetism and its first propounders,[344]

in 1679. The magico-theosophical philosophy is fully vindicated in his

works.

The well-known Dr. Hufeland has written a work on magic[345] in which

he propounds the theory of the universal magnetic sympathy between men,

animals, plants, and even minerals. The testimony of Campanella, Van

Helmont, and Servius, is confirmed by him in relation to the sympathy

existing between the different parts of the body as well as between the

parts of all organic and even inorganic bodies.

Such also was the doctrine of Tenzel Wirdig. It may even be found

expounded in his works, with far more clearness, logic, and vigor,

than in those of other mystical authors who have treated of the same

subject. In his famous treatise, _The New Spiritual Medicine_, he

demonstrates, on the ground of the later-accepted fact of universal

attraction and repulsion—now called “gravitation” that the whole nature

is _ensouled_. Wirdig calls this magnetic sympathy “the accordance

of spirits.” Everything is drawn to its like, and converges with

natures congenial to itself. Out of this sympathy and antipathy

arises a constant movement in the whole world, and in all its parts,

and uninterrupted communion between heaven and earth, which produces

universal harmony. Everything lives and perishes through magnetism;

one thing affects another one, even at great distances, and its

“congenitals” may be influenced to health and disease by the power

of this sympathy, at any time, and notwithstanding the intervening

space.[346] “Hufeland,” says Ennemoser, “gives the account of a nose

which had been cut from the back of a porter, but which, when the

porter died, died too and fell off from its artificial position. A

piece of skin,” adds Hufeland, “taken from a living head, had its

hair turn gray at the same time as that on the head from which it was

taken.”[347]

Kepler, the forerunner of Newton in many great truths, even in that of

the universal “gravitation” which he very justly attributed to magnetic

attraction, notwithstanding that he terms astrology “the insane

daughter of a most wise mother” Astronomy, shares the kabalistic belief {208}

that the spirits of the stars are so many “intelligences.” _He firmly

believes that each planet is the seat of an intelligent principle,

and that they are all inhabited by spiritual beings, who exercise

influences over other beings inhabiting more gross and material spheres

than their own and especially_ our earth.[348] As Kepler’s _spiritual_

starry influences were superseded by the vortices of the more

materialistic Descartes, whose atheistical tendencies did not prevent

him from believing that he had found out a diet that would prolong his

life five hundred years and more, so the vortices of the latter and his

astronomical doctrines may some day give place to the _intelligent_

magnetic streams which are directed by the _Anima Mundi_.

Baptista Porta, the learned Italian philosopher, notwithstanding his

endeavors to show to the world the groundlessness of their accusations

of magic being a superstition and sorcery, was treated by later critics

with the same unfairness as his colleagues. This celebrated alchemist

left a work on _Natural Magic_,[349] in which he bases all of the

occult phenomena possible to man upon the world-soul which binds all

with all. He shows that the astral light acts in harmony and sympathy

with all nature; that it is the essence out of which our spirits are

formed; and that by acting in unison with their parent-source, our

sidereal bodies are rendered capable of producing magic wonders. The

whole secret depends on our knowledge of kindred elements. He believed

in the philosopher’s stone, “of which the world hath so great an

opinion of, which hath been bragged of in so many ages and _happily

attained unto by some_.” Finally, he throws out many valuable hints as

to its “spiritual meaning.” In 1643, there appeared among the mystics

a monk, Father Kircher, who taught a complete philosophy of universal

magnetism. His numerous works[350] embrace many of the subjects merely

hinted at by Paracelsus. His definition of magnetism is very original,

for he contradicted Gilbert’s theory that the earth was a great magnet.

He asserted that although every particle of matter, and even the

intangible invisible “powers” were magnetic, they did not themselves

constitute a magnet. _There is but one_ MAGNET _in the universe, and

from it proceeds the magnetization of everything existing._ This {209}

magnet is of course what the kabalists term the central Spiritual

Sun, or God. The sun, moon, planets, and stars he affirmed are highly

magnetic; but they have become so by induction from living in the

universal magnetic fluid—the Spiritual light. He proves the mysterious

sympathy existing between the bodies of the three principal kingdoms

of nature, and strengthens his argument by a stupendous catalogue of

instances. Many of these were verified by naturalists, but still more

have remained unauthenticated; therefore, according to the traditional

policy and very equivocal logic of our scientists, they are denied.

For instance, he shows a difference between mineral magnetism and

zoömagnetism, or animal magnetism. He demonstrates it in the fact that

except in the case of the lodestone all the minerals are magnetized by

the higher potency, the animal magnetism, while the latter enjoys it as

the direct emanation from the first cause—the Creator. A needle can be

magnetized by simply being held in the hand of a strong-willed man, and

amber develops its powers more by the friction of the human hand than

by any other object; therefore man can impart his own life, and, to a

certain degree, _animate_ inorganic objects. This, “in the eyes of the

foolish, is sorcery.” “The sun is the most magnetic of all bodies,” he

says; thus anticipating the theory of General Pleasonton by more than

two centuries. “The ancient philosophers never denied the fact,” he

adds; “but have at all times perceived that the sun’s emanations were

binding all things to itself, and that it imparts this binding power to

everything falling under its direct rays.”

As a proof of it he brings the instance of a number of plants being

especially attracted to the sun, and others to the moon, and showing

their irresistible sympathy to the former by following its course

in the heavens. The plant known as the _Githymal_,[351] faithfully

follows its sovereign, even when it is invisible on account of the

fog. The acacia uncloses its petals at its rising, and closes them at

its setting. So does the Egyptian lotos and the common sunflower. The

nightshade exhibits the same predilection for the moon.

As examples of antipathies or sympathies among plants, he instances the

aversion which the vine feels for the cabbage, and its fondness toward

the olive-tree; the love of the ranunculus for the water-lily, and of

the rue for the fig. The antipathy which sometimes exists even among

kindred substances is clearly demonstrated in the case of the Mexican

pomegranate, whose shoots, when cut to pieces, repel each other with

the “most extraordinary ferocity.”

Kircher accounts for every feeling in human nature as results of

changes in our magnetic condition. Anger, jealousy, friendship, love, {210}

and hatred, are all modifications of the magnetic atmosphere which

is developed in us and constantly emanates from us. Love is one of

the most variable, and therefore the aspects of it are numberless.

Spiritual love, that of a mother for her child, of an artist for

some particular art, love as pure friendship, are purely magnetic

manifestations of sympathy in congenial natures. _The magnetism of

pure love is the originator of every created thing._ In its ordinary

sense love between the sexes is electricity, and he calls it _amor

febris species_, the fever of species. There are two kinds of magnetic

attraction: sympathy and fascination; the one holy and natural, the

other evil and unnatural. To the latter, fascination, we must attribute

the power of the poisonous toad, which upon merely opening its mouth,

forces the passing reptile or insect to run into it to its destruction.

The deer, as well as smaller animals, are attracted by the breath

of the boa, and are made irresistibly to come within its reach. The

electric fish, the torpedo, repels the arm with a shock that for a

time benumbs it. To exercise such a power for beneficent purposes, man

requires three conditions: 1, nobility of soul; 2, strong will and

imaginative faculty; 3, a subject weaker than the magnetizer; otherwise

he will resist. A man free from worldly incentives and sensuality, may

cure in such a way the most “incurable” diseases, and his vision may

become clear and prophetic.

A curious instance of the above-mentioned universal attraction between

all the bodies of the planetary system and everything organic as well

as inorganic pertaining to them, is found in a quaint old volume of

the seventeenth century. It contains notes of travel and an official

report to the King of France, by his Ambassador, de la Loubère, upon

what he has seen in the kingdom of Siam. “At Siam,” he says, “there are

two species of fresh-water fish, which they respectively call _pal-out_

and _pla-cadi_ fish. Once salted and placed uncut (whole) in the pot,

they are found to exactly follow the flux and reflux of the sea,

growing higher and lower in the pot as the sea ebbs or flows.”[352] De

la Loubère experimented with this fish for a long time, together with

a government engineer, named Vincent, and, therefore, vouches for the

truth of this assertion, which at first had been dismissed as an idle

fable. So powerful is this mysterious attraction that it affected the

fishes even when their bodies became totally rotten and fell to pieces.

It is especially in the countries unblessed with civilization that

we should seek for an explanation of the nature, and observe the

effects of that subtile power, which ancient philosophers called the {211}

“world’s soul.” In the East only, and on the boundless tracts of

unexplored Africa, will the student of psychology find abundant food

for his truth-hungering soul. The reason is obvious. The atmosphere

in populous neighborhoods is badly vitiated by the smoke and fumes of

manufactories, steam-engines, railroads, and steamboats, and especially

by the miasmatic exhalations of the living and the dead. Nature is as

dependent as a human being upon conditions before she can work, and

her mighty breathing, so to say, can be as easily interfered with,

impeded, and arrested, and the correlation of her forces destroyed in

a given spot, as though she were a man. Not only climate, but also

occult influences daily felt not only modify the physio-psychological

nature of man, but even alter the constitution of so-called inorganic

matter in a degree not fairly realized by European science. Thus the

London _Medical and Surgical Journal_ advises surgeons not to carry

lancets to Calcutta, because it has been found by personal experience

“that English steel could not bear the atmosphere of India;” so a

bunch of English or American keys will be completely covered with rust

twenty-four hours after having been brought to Egypt; while objects

made of native steel in those countries remain unoxidized. So, too, it

has been found that a Siberian Shaman who has given stupendous proofs

of his occult powers among his native Tschuktschen, is gradually and

often completely deprived of such powers when coming into smoky and

foggy London. Is the inner organism of man less sensitive to climatic

influences than a bit of steel? If not, then why should we cast doubt

upon the testimony of travellers who may have seen the Shaman, day

after day, exhibit phenomena of the most astounding character in his

native country, and deny the possibility of such powers and such

phenomena, only because he cannot do as much in London or Paris? In

his lecture on the _Lost Arts_, Wendell Phillips proves that beside

the psychological nature of man being affected by a change of climate,

Oriental people have physical senses far more acute than the Europeans.

The French dyers of Lyons, whom no one can surpass in skill, he says,

“have a theory that there is a certain delicate shade of blue that

Europeans _cannot see_.... And in Cashmere, where the girls make

shawls worth $30,000, they will show him (the dyer of Lyons) three

hundred distinct colors, which he not only cannot make, but _cannot

even distinguish_.” If there is such a vast difference between the

acuteness of the external senses of two races, why should there not be

the same in their psychological powers? Moreover, the eye of a Cashmere

girl is able to see _objectively_ a color which does exist, but which

being inappreciable by the European, is therefore non-existent for him.

Why then not concede, that some peculiarly-endowed organisms, which

are thought to be possessed of that mysterious faculty called _second {212}

sight_, see their pictures as objectively as the girl sees the colors;

and that therefore the former, instead of mere objective hallucinations

called forth by imagination are, on the contrary, reflections of real

things and persons impressed upon the astral ether, as explained by the

old philosophy of the _Chaldean Oracles_, and surmised by those modern

discoverers, Babbage, Jevons, and the authors of the _Unseen Universe_?

“Three spirits live and actuate man,” teaches Paracelsus; “three

worlds pour their beams upon him; but all three only as the image and

echo of one and the same all constructing and uniting principle of

production. The first is the spirit of the elements (terrestrial body

and vital force in its brute condition); the second, the spirit of the

stars (sidereal or astral body—the soul); the third is the _Divine_

spirit (_Augoeidés_).” Our human body, being possessed of “primeval

earth-stuff,” as Paracelsus calls it, we may readily accept the

tendency of modern scientific research “to regard the processes of both

animal and vegetable life as simply physical and chemical.” This theory

only the more corroborates the assertions of old philosophers and the

_Mosaic Bible_, that from the dust of the ground our bodies were made,

and to dust they will return. But we must remember that

“‘Dust thou art, to dust returnest,’

Was not spoken of the soul.”

Man is a little world—a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a

fœtus, he is suspended, by all his _three_ spirits, in the matrix

of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant

sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with

the sidereal _anima mundi_. He is in it, as it is in him, for the

world-pervading element fills all space, and _is_ space itself, only

shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it

but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding

directly from the Highest Cause—the Spiritual Light of the World?

This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature—the spiritual and

the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that

“The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third,

the paradigm, or pattern of the universe;” the three constituting the

Intelligible Triad. Everything in this visible universe is the outflow

of this Triad, and a microcosmic triad itself. And thus they move in

majestic procession in the fields of eternity, around the spiritual

sun, as in the heliocentric system the celestial bodies move round the

visible suns. The Pythagorean _Monad_, which lives “in solitude and

darkness,” may remain on this earth forever invisible, impalpable,

and undemonstrated by experimental science. Still the whole universe

will be gravitating around it, as it did from the “beginning of time,” {213}

and with every second, man and atom approach nearer to that solemn

moment in the eternity, when the Invisible Presence will become clear

to their spiritual sight. When every particle of matter, even the

most sublimated, has been cast off from the last shape that forms the

ultimate link of that chain of double evolution which, throughout

millions of ages and successive transformations, has pushed the entity

onward; and when it shall find itself reclothed in that primordial

essence, identical with that of its Creator, then this once impalpable

organic atom will have run its race, and the sons of God will once more

“shout for joy” at the return of the pilgrim.

“Man,” says Van Helmont, “is the mirror of the universe, and his triple

nature stands in relationship to all things.” The will of the Creator,

through which all things were made and received their first impulse,

is the property of every living being. Man, endowed with an additional

spirituality, has the largest share of it on this planet. It depends on

the proportion of matter in him whether he will exercise its magical

faculty with more or less success. Sharing this divine potency in

common with every inorganic atom, he exercises it through the course

of his whole life, whether consciously or otherwise. In the former

case, when in the full possession of his powers, he will be the master,

and the _magnale magnum_ (the universal soul) will be controlled and

guided by him. In the cases of animals, plants, minerals, and even

of the average of humanity, this ethereal fluid which pervades all

things, finding no resistance, and being left to itself, moves them as

its impulse directs. Every created being in this sublunary sphere, is

formed out of the _magnale magnum_, and is related to it. Man possesses

a double celestial power, and is allied to heaven. This power is “not

only in the outer man, but to a degree also in the animals, and perhaps

in all other things, as all things in the universe stand in a relation

to each other; or, at least, God is in all things, as the ancients

have observed it with a worthy correctness. It is necessary that the

magic strength should be awakened in the outer as well as in the inner

man.... And if we call this a magic power, the uninstructed only can

be terrified by the expression. But, if you prefer it, you can call it

a spiritual power—_spirituale robur vocitaveris_. There is, therefore,

such magic power in the inner man. But, as there exists a certain

relationship between the inner and the outer man, this strength must be

diffused through the whole man.”[353]

In an extended description of the religious rites, monastic life, and

“superstitions” of the Siamese, de la Loubère cites among other things

the wonderful power possessed by the _Talapoin_ (the monks, or the {214}

holy men of Buddha) over the wild beasts. “The Talapoin of Siam,” he

says, “will pass whole weeks in the dense woods under a small awning

of branches and palm leaves, and never make a fire in the night to

scare away the wild beasts, as all other people do who travel through

the woods of this country.” The people consider it a miracle that no

Talapoin is ever devoured. The tigers, elephants, and rhinoceroses—with

which the neighborhood abounds—respect him; and travellers placed in

secure ambuscade have often seen these wild beasts lick the hands and

feet of the sleeping Talapoin. “They all use magic,” adds the French

gentleman, “and think all nature animated (ensouled);[354] they believe

in tutelar geniuses.” But that which seems to shock the author most is

the idea which prevails among the Siamese, “that all that man was in

his bodily life, he will be after death.” “When the Tartar, which now

reigns at China,” remarks de la Loubère, “would force the Chinese to

shave their hair after the Tartarian fashion, several of them chose

rather to suffer death, than to go, they said, into the other world and

appear before their ancestors without hair; imagining that they shaved

the head of the soul also!”[355] “Now, what is altogether impertinent,”

adds the Ambassador, “in this absurd opinion is, that the Orientals

attribute the human figure rather than any other to the soul.” Without

enlightening his reader as to the particular shape these benighted

Orientals ought to select for their disembodied souls, de la Loubère

proceeds to pour out his wrath on these “savages.” Finally, he attacks

the memory of the old king of Siam, the father of the one to whose

court he was sent, by accusing him of having foolishly spent over two

million livres in search of the philosopher’s stone. “The Chinese,” he

says, “reputed so wise, have for three or four thousand years had the

folly of believing in the existence, and of seeking out a universal

remedy by which they hope to exempt themselves from the necessity of

dying. They base themselves on some foolish traditions, concerning

some _rare_ persons that are reported to have made gold, and to have

lived some ages; there are some very strongly established facts among

the Chinese, the Siamese, and other Orientals, concerning those that

know how to render themselves immortal, either absolutely, or in such

a manner that they can die no otherwise than by violent death.[356]

Wherefore, they name some persons who have withdrawn themselves from

the sight of men to enjoy free and peaceable life. They relate wonders

concerning the knowledge of these pretended immortals.”

If Descartes, a Frenchman and a scientist, could, in the midst of

civilization, firmly believe that such a universal remedy had been {215}

found, and that if possessed of it he could live at least five hundred

years, why are not the Orientals entitled to the same belief? The

master-problems of both life and death are still unsolved by occidental

physiologists. Even sleep is a phenomenon about whose cause there is a

great divergence of opinion among them. How, then, can they pretend to

set limits to the possible, and define the impossible?

From the remotest ages the philosophers have maintained the singular

power of music over certain diseases, especially of the nervous

class. Kircher recommends it, having experienced its good effects in

himself, and he gives an elaborate description of the instrument he

employed. It was a harmonica composed of five tumblers of a very thin

glass, placed in a row. In two of them were two different varieties of

wine; in the third, brandy; in the fourth, oil; in the fifth, water.

He extracted five melodious sounds from them in the usual way, by

merely rubbing his finger on the edges of the tumblers. The sound has

an attractive property; it draws out disease, which streams out to

encounter the musical wave, and the two, blending together, disappear

in space. Asclepiades employed music for the same purpose, some twenty

centuries ago; he blew a trumpet to cure sciatica, and its prolonged

sound making the fibres of the nerves to palpitate, the pain invariably

subsided. Democritus in like manner affirmed that many diseases could

be cured by the melodious sounds of a flute. Mesmer used this very

harmonica described by Kircher for his magnetic cures. The celebrated

Scotchman, Maxwell, offered to prove to various medical faculties that

with certain magnetic means at his disposal, he would cure any of the

diseases abandoned by them as incurable; such as epilepsy, impotence,

insanity, lameness, dropsy, and the most obstinate fevers.[357]

The familiar story of the exorcism of the “evil spirit from God” that

obsessed Saul, will recur to every one in this connection. It is thus

related: “And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon

Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: _so Saul was

refreshed, and was well_, and the evil spirit departed from him.”[358]

Maxwell, in his _Medicina Magnetica_, expounds the following

propositions, all which are the very doctrines of the alchemists and

kabalists.

“That which men call the world-soul, is a life, as fire, spiritual,

fleet, light, and ethereal as light itself. It is a life-spirit

everywhere, and everywhere the same.... All matter is destitute of

action, except as it is ensouled by this spirit. This spirit maintains

all things in their peculiar condition. It is found in nature free from {216}

all fetters; and he who understands how to unite it with a harmonizing

body, possesses a treasure which exceeds all riches.”

“This spirit is the common bond of all quarters of the earth, and lives

through and in all—_adest in mundo quid commune omnibus mextis, in quo

ipsa permanent_.”

“He who knows this universal life-spirit and its application can

prevent all injuries.”[359]

“If thou canst avail thyself of this spirit and fix it on some

particular body thou wilt perform the mystery of magic.”

“He who knows how to operate on men by this universal spirit, can heal,

and this at any distance that he pleases.”[360]

“He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one,

_might continue his life to eternity_.”[361]

“There is a blending together of spirits, or of emanations, even when

they are far separated from each other. And what is this blending

together? It is an eternal and incessant outpouring of the rays of one

body into another.”

“In the meantime,” says Maxwell, “it is not _without danger_ to treat

of this. Many abominable abuses of this may take place.”

And now let us see what are these abuses of mesmeric and magnetic

powers in some healing mediums.

Healing, to deserve the name, requires either faith in the patient,

or robust health united with a strong will, in the operator. _With

expectency supplemented by faith, one can cure himself of almost any

morbific condition._ The tomb of a saint; a holy relic; a talisman; a

bit of paper or a garment that has been handled by the supposed healer;

a nostrum; a penance, or a ceremonial; the laying on of hands, or a

few words impressively pronounced—either will do. It is a question of

temperament, imagination, self-cure. In thousands of instances, the

doctor, the priest, or the relic has had credit for healings that were

solely and simply due to the patient’s unconscious will. The woman with

the bloody issue who pressed through the throng to touch the robe of

Jesus, was told that her “faith” had made her whole.

The influence of mind over the body is so powerful that it has effected

miracles at all ages.

“How many unhoped-for, sudden, and prodigious cures have been effected

by imagination,” says Salverte. “Our medical books are filled with

facts of this nature which would easily pass for miracles.”[362]

But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically {217}

negative and receptive, and the healer strong, healthy, positive,

determined, the disease may be extirpated by the imperative will of the

operator, which, consciously or unconsciously, draws to and reinforces

itself with the universal spirit of nature, and restores the disturbed

equilibrium of the patient’s aura. He may employ as an auxiliary, a

crucifix—as Gassner did; or impose the hands and “will,” like the

French Zouave Jacob, like our celebrated American, Newton, the healer

of many thousands of sufferers, and like many others; or like Jesus,

and some apostles, he may cure by the word of command. The process in

each case is the same.

In all these instances, the cure is radical and real, and without

secondary ill-effects. But, when one who is himself physically

diseased, attempts healing, he not only fails of that, but often

imparts his illness to his patient, and robs him of what strength he

may have. The decrepit King David reinforced his failing vigor with the

healthy magnetism of the young Abishag;[363] and the medical works tell

us of an aged lady of Bath, England, who broke down the constitutions

of two maids in succession, in the same way. The old sages, and

Paracelsus also, removed disease by applying a healthy organism to the

afflicted part, and in the works of the above-said fire-philosopher,

their theory is boldly and categorically set forth. If a diseased

person—medium or not—attempts to heal, his force may be sufficiently

robust to displace the disease, to disturb it in the present place,

and cause it to shift to another, where shortly it will appear; the

patient, meanwhile, thinking himself cured.

But, what if the healer be morally diseased? The consequences may

be infinitely more mischievous; for it is easier to cure a bodily

disease than cleanse a constitution infected with moral turpitude. The

mystery of Morzine, Cevennes, and that of the Jansenists, is still as

great a mystery for physiologists as for psychologists. If the gift

of prophecy, as well as hysteria and convulsions, can be imparted by

“infection,” why not every vice? The healer, in such a case, conveys

to his patient—who is now his victim—the moral poison that infects

his own mind and heart. His magnetic touch is defilement; his glance,

profanation. Against this insidious taint, there is no protection for

the passively-receptive subject. The healer holds him under his power,

spellbound and powerless, as the serpent holds a poor, weak bird. The

evil that one such “healing medium” can effect is incalculably great;

and such healers there are by the hundred.

But, as we have said before, there are real and God-like healers,

who, notwithstanding all the malice and skepticism of their bigoted {218}

opponents, have become famous in the world’s history. Such are the

Curé d’Ars, of Lyons, Jacob, and Newton. Such, also, were Gassner, the

clergyman of Klorstele, and the well-known Valentine Greatrakes, the

ignorant and poor Irishman, who was endorsed by the celebrated Robert

Boyle, President of the Royal Society of London, in 1670. In 1870,

he would have been sent to Bedlam, in company with other healers, if

another president of the same society had had the disposal of the case,

or Professor Lankester would have “summoned” him under the _Vagrant

Act_ for practicing upon Her Majesty’s subjects “by _palmistry_ or

otherwise.”

But, to close a list of witnesses which might be extended indefinitely,

it will suffice to say that, from first to last, from Pythagoras down

to Eliphas Levi, from highest to humblest, every one teaches _that

the magical power is never possessed by those addicted to vicious

indulgences_. Only the pure in heart “see God,” or exercise divine

gifts—only such can heal the ills of the body, and allow themselves,

with relative security, to be guided by the “invisible powers.” Such

only can give peace to the disturbed spirits of their brothers and

sisters, for the healing waters come from no poisonous source; grapes

do not grow on thorns, and thistles bear no figs. But, for all this,

“magic has nothing supernal in it;” it is a science, and even the power

of “casting out devils” was a branch of it, of which the Initiates made

a special study. “That skill which expels demons out of human bodies,

is a science useful and sanative to men,” says Josephus.[364]

The foregoing sketches are sufficient to show why we hold fast to

the wisdom of the ages, in preference to any new theories that may

have been hatched from the occurrences of our later days, respecting

the laws of intermundane intercourse and the occult powers of man.

While phenomena of a physical nature may have their value as a means

of arousing the interest of materialists, and confirming, if not

wholly, at least inferentially, our belief in the survival of our

souls and spirits, it is questionable whether, under their present

aspect, the modern phenomena are not doing more harm than good. Many

minds, hungering after proofs of immortality, are fast falling into

fanaticism; and, as Stow remarks, “fanatics are governed rather by

imagination than judgment.”

Undoubtedly, believers in the modern phenomena can claim for themselves

a diversity of endowments, but the “discerning of spirits” is evidently

absent from this catalogue of “spiritual” gifts. Speaking of the

“Diakka,” whom he one fine morning had discovered in a shady corner of

the “Summer Land,” A. J. Davis, the great American seer, remarks: “A

Diakka is one who takes insane delight in _playing parts_, in juggling {219}

_tricks_, in _personating_ opposite characters; to whom prayer and

profane utterances are of equi-value; surcharged with a passion for

lyrical narrations; ... morally deficient, he is without the active

feelings of justice, philanthropy, or tender affection. He knows

nothing of what men call the sentiment of gratitude; the ends of hate

and love are the same to him; his motto is often fearful and terrible

to others—SELF is the whole of private living, and exalted annihilation

_the end of all private life_.[365] Only yesterday, one said to a

lady medium, signing himself _Swedenborg_, this: “Whatsoever is, has

been, will be, or may be, _that_ I AM; and private life is but the

aggregative phantasms of thinking throblets, rushing in their rising

onward to the central heart of eternal death!”[366]