PHILOSOPHICAL DELUSIONS.
Dissatisfaction with his lot seems to be the characteristic of man in
all ages and climates. So far, however, from being an evil, as at first
might be supposed, it has been the great civiliser of our race; and has
tended, more than anything else, to raise us above the condition of
the brutes. But the same discontent which has been the source of all
improvement, has been the parent of no small progeny of follies and
absurdities; to trace these latter is the object of the present volume.
Vast as the subject appears, it is easily reducible within such limits
as will make it comprehensive without being wearisome, and render its
study both instructive and amusing.
Three causes especially have excited our discontent; and, by impelling
us to seek for remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a
maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and ignorance of the
future--the doom of man upon this sphere, and for which he shows his
antipathy by his love of life, his longing for abundance, and his
craving curiosity to pierce the secrets of the days to come. The first
has led many to imagine that they might find means to avoid death, or,
failing in this, that they might, nevertheless, so prolong existence as
to reckon it by centuries instead of units. From this sprang the search,
so long continued and still pursued, for the elixir vitae, or water of
life, which has led thousands to pretend to it and millions to believe
in it. From the second sprang the absurd search for the philosopher's
stone, which was to create plenty by changing all metals into gold; and
from the third, the false sciences of astrology, divination, and their
divisions of necromancy, chiromancy, augury, with all their train of
signs, portents, and omens.
In tracing the career of the erring philosophers, or the wilful cheats,
who have encouraged or preyed upon the credulity of mankind, it
will simplify and elucidate the subject, if we divide it into three
classes:--the first comprising alchymists, or those in general who have
devoted themselves to the discovering of the philosopher's stone and
the water of life; the second comprising astrologers, necromancers,
sorcerers, geomancers, and all those who pretended to discover futurity;
and the third consisting of the dealers in charms, amulets, philters,
universal-panacea mongers, touchers for the evil, seventh sons of a
seventh son, sympathetic powder compounders, homeopathists, animal
magnetizers, and all the motley tribe of quacks, empirics, and
charlatans.
But, in narrating the career of such men, it will be found that many
of them united several or all of the functions just mentioned; that the
alchymist was a fortune-teller, or a necromancer--that he pretended to
cure all maladies by touch or charm, and to work miracles of every kind.
In the dark and early ages of European history, this is more especially
the case. Even as we advance to more recent periods, we shall find great
difficulty in separating the characters. The alchymist seldom confined
himself strictly to his pretended science--the sorcerer and necromancer
to theirs, or the medical charlatan to his. Beginning with alchymy, some
confusion of these classes is unavoidable; but the ground will clear for
us as we advance.
Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt
from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into
which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be
uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood
and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false
opinions that swayed his actions at that time, that he may wonder at
them, so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions
which governed the ages fled. He is but a superficial thinker who would
despise and refuse to hear of them merely because they are absurd. No
man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors,
either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to
be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and
credulity. And not only is such a study instructive: he who reads for
amusement only, will find no chapter in the annals of the human mind
more amusing than this. It opens out the whole realm of fiction--the
wild, the fantastic, and the wonderful, and all the immense variety of
things "that are not, and cannot be; but that have been imagined and
believed."