Chapter VII
CHAPTER VII.
"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.
E
TERNITY! Thou pleasing, dreadful thought!"--ADDISON.
"There is another and a better world."--KOTZEBUE: The Stranger.
A
FTER 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 mediaeval alchemists and certain other illustrious men. Almost without exception, ancient and mediaeval 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 and
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. **
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 life,
The esteemed philosopher, Pierre Poiret Naude, was the warmest defender of the doctrines of occult magnetism and its first propounders, ** in 1679. The magico-theosophical philosophy is fully vindicated in his works.
The well-known Dr. Hufeland has written a work on magic *** 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. **** "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." *****
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
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. * 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, ** 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 *** 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 magnet is of course what the kabalists term
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, * 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, and
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 Loubere, 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." * De la Loubere 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 "world's soul."
Lost Arts, Wendell Phillips proves that besides 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 sight,
Divine spirit (Augoeides)." 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 foetus, 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," and
"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." *
In an extended description of the religious rites, monastic life, and "superstitions" of the Siamese, de la Loubere cites among other things the wonderful power possessed by the Talapoin (the monks, or the holy
If Descartes, a Frenchman and a scientist, could, in the midst of civilization, firmly believe that such a universal remedy had been found,
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." **
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 all fetters; and he
"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." *
"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." **
"He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity." ***
"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 expectancy 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." ****
But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically nega-
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
"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.
A
FTER 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 mediaeval alchemists and certain other illustrious men. Almost without exception, ancient and mediaeval 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 and
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. **
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 life,
The esteemed philosopher, Pierre Poiret Naude, was the warmest defender of the doctrines of occult magnetism and its first propounders, ** in 1679. The magico-theosophical philosophy is fully vindicated in his works.
The well-known Dr. Hufeland has written a work on magic *** 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. **** "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." *****
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
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. * 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, ** 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 *** 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 magnet is of course what the kabalists term
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, * 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, and
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 Loubere, 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." * De la Loubere 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 "world's soul."
Lost Arts, Wendell Phillips proves that besides 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 sight,
Divine spirit (Augoeides)." 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 foetus, 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," and
"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." *
In an extended description of the religious rites, monastic life, and "superstitions" of the Siamese, de la Loubere cites among other things the wonderful power possessed by the Talapoin (the monks, or the holy
If Descartes, a Frenchman and a scientist, could, in the midst of civilization, firmly believe that such a universal remedy had been found,
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." **
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 all fetters; and he
"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." *
"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." **
"He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity." ***
"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 expectancy 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." ****
But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically nega-
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
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, ** 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 *** 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 magnet is of course what the kabalists term
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, * 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, and
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 Loubere, 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." * De la Loubere 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 "world's soul."
Lost Arts, Wendell Phillips proves that besides 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 sight,
Divine spirit (Augoeides)." 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 foetus, 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," and
"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." *
In an extended description of the religious rites, monastic life, and "superstitions" of the Siamese, de la Loubere cites among other things the wonderful power possessed by the Talapoin (the monks, or the holy
If Descartes, a Frenchman and a scientist, could, in the midst of civilization, firmly believe that such a universal remedy had been found,
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." **
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 all fetters; and he
"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." *
"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." **
"He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity." ***
"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 expectancy 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." ****
But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically nega-
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
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, * 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, and
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 Loubere, 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." * De la Loubere 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 "world's soul."
Lost Arts, Wendell Phillips proves that besides 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 sight,
Divine spirit (Augoeides)." 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 foetus, 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," and
"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." *
In an extended description of the religious rites, monastic life, and "superstitions" of the Siamese, de la Loubere cites among other things the wonderful power possessed by the Talapoin (the monks, or the holy
If Descartes, a Frenchman and a scientist, could, in the midst of civilization, firmly believe that such a universal remedy had been found,
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." **
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 all fetters; and he
"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." *
"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." **
"He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity." ***
"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 expectancy 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." ****
But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically nega-
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
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 Loubere, 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." * De la Loubere 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 "world's soul."
Lost Arts, Wendell Phillips proves that besides 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 sight,
Divine spirit (Augoeides)." 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 foetus, 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," and
"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." *
In an extended description of the religious rites, monastic life, and "superstitions" of the Siamese, de la Loubere cites among other things the wonderful power possessed by the Talapoin (the monks, or the holy
If Descartes, a Frenchman and a scientist, could, in the midst of civilization, firmly believe that such a universal remedy had been found,
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." **
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 all fetters; and he
"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." *
"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." **
"He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity." ***
"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 expectancy 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." ****
But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically nega-
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
Divine spirit (Augoeides)." 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 foetus, 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," and
"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." *
In an extended description of the religious rites, monastic life, and "superstitions" of the Siamese, de la Loubere cites among other things the wonderful power possessed by the Talapoin (the monks, or the holy
If Descartes, a Frenchman and a scientist, could, in the midst of civilization, firmly believe that such a universal remedy had been found,
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." **
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 all fetters; and he
"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." *
"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." **
"He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity." ***
"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 expectancy 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." ****
But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically nega-
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
" '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 foetus, 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," and
"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." *
In an extended description of the religious rites, monastic life, and "superstitions" of the Siamese, de la Loubere cites among other things the wonderful power possessed by the Talapoin (the monks, or the holy
If Descartes, a Frenchman and a scientist, could, in the midst of civilization, firmly believe that such a universal remedy had been found,
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." **
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 all fetters; and he
"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." *
"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." **
"He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity." ***
"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 expectancy 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." ****
But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically nega-
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
"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." *
In an extended description of the religious rites, monastic life, and "superstitions" of the Siamese, de la Loubere cites among other things the wonderful power possessed by the Talapoin (the monks, or the holy
If Descartes, a Frenchman and a scientist, could, in the midst of civilization, firmly believe that such a universal remedy had been found,
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." **
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 all fetters; and he
"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." *
"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." **
"He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity." ***
"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 expectancy 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." ****
But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically nega-
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
"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." *
"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." **
"He who can invigorate the particular spirit through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity." ***
"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 expectancy 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." ****
But, if the patient has no faith, what then? If he is physically nega-
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
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; * 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, spell-bound 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 opponents,
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
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. *
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
Porphyry, whose works--to borrow the expression of an irritated phenomenalist--"are mouldering like every other antiquated trash in the closets of oblivion," speaks thus of these Diakka--if such be their name--rediscovered in the nineteenth century: "It is with the direct help of these bad demons, that every kind of sorcery is accomplished . . . it is the result of their operations, and men who injure their fellow-creatures by enchantments, usually pay great honors to these bad demons, and especially to their chief. These spirits pass their time in deceiving us, with a great display of cheap prodigies and illusions; their ambition is to be taken for gods, and their leader demands to be recognized as the supreme god." ***
The spirit signing himself Swedenborg--just quoted from Davis's Diakka, and hinting that he is the I AM, singularly resembles this chief leader of Porphyry's bad demons.
What more natural than this vilification of the ancient and experienced theurgists by certain mediums, when we find Iamblichus, the expositor of spiritualistic theurgy, strictly forbidding all endeavors to procure such phenomenal manifestations; unless, after a long preparation of moral and physical purification, and under the guidance of experienced theurgists. When, furthermore, he declares that, with very few exceptions, for a person "to appear elongated or thicker, or be borne aloft in the air," is a sure mark of obsession by bad demons. ****
Everything in this world has its time, and truth, however based upon unimpeachable evidence, will not root or grow, unless, like a plant, it is thrown into soil in its proper season. "The age must be prepared,"
any spirit, let the tests be what they may? We have not yet arrived at that stage of enlightenment that would enable us to reply confidently to this inquiry. . . . There is much that is yet a puzzle in the language and action of this class of materialized spirits." As to the intellectual calibre of most of the spirits which lurk behind the physical phenomena, Mr. Sargent will unquestionably be accepted as a most competent judge, and he says, "the great majority, as in this world, are of the unintellectual sort." If it is a fair question, we would like to ask why they should be so lacking in intelligence, if they are human spirits? Either intelligent human spirits cannot materialize, or, the spirits that do materialize have not human intelligence, and, therefore, by Mr. Sargent's own showing, they may just as well be "elementary" spirits, who have ceased to be human altogether, or those demons, which, according to the Persian Magi and Plato, hold a middle rank between gods and disembodied men.
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
There is good evidence, that of Mr. Crookes for one, to show that many "materialized" spirits talk in an audible voice. Now, we have shown, on the testimony of ancients, that the voice of human spirits is not and cannot be articulated; being, as Emanuel Swedenborg declares, "a deep suspiration." Who of the two classes of witnesses may be trusted more safely? Is it the ancients who had the experience of so many ages in theurgical practices, or modern spiritualists, who have had none at all, and who have no facts upon which to base an opinion, except such as have been communicated by "spirits," whose identity they have no means
It is simply ridiculous and absurd to require from every investigator who comes forward as a witness to the marvels of the day and psychological phenomena the diploma of a master of arts and sciences. The experience of the past forty years is an evidence that it is not always the minds which are the most "scientifically trained" that are the best in matters of simple common sense and honest truth. Nothing blinds like
true religion in their fall. But the longing for some outward sign of a God and a life hereafter, remains as tenaciously as ever in the human heart. In vain is all sophistry of science; it can never stifle the voice of nature. Only her representatives have poisoned the pure waters of simple faith, and now humanity mirrors itself in waters made turbid with all the mud stirred up from the bottom of the once pure spring. The anthropomorphic God of our fathers is replaced by anthropomorphic monsters; and what is still worse, by the reflection of humanity itself in these waters, whose ripples send it back the distorted images of truth and facts as evoked by its misguided imagination. "It is not a miracle that we want," writes the Reverend Brooke Herford, "but to find palpable evidence of the spiritual and the divine. It is not to the prophets that men cry for such a 'sign,' but rather to the scientists. Men feel as if all that groping about in the foremost verge or innermost recesses of creation should bring the investigator at length close to the deep, underlying facts of all things, to some unmistakable signs of God." The signs are there, and the scientists too; what can we expect more of them, now
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
These men have proved untrue to their own teachings. The opportunity afforded them by the opening of the Orient, to investigate for themselves the phenomena alleged by every traveller to take place in those countries, has been rejected. Did our physiologists and pathologists ever so much as think of availing themselves of it to settle this most momentous subject of human thought? Oh, no; for they would never dare. It is not to be expected that the principal Academicians of Europe and America should undertake a joint journey to Thibet and India, and investigate the fakir marvel on the spot! And were one of them to go as a solitary pilgrim and witness all the miracles of creation, in that land of wonders, who, of his colleagues, could be expected to believe his testimony?
It would be as tedious as superfluous to begin a restatement of facts, so forcibly put by others, Mr. Wallace and W. Howitt, * have repeatedly and cleverly described the thousand and one absurd errors into which the learned societies of France and England have fallen, through their blind skepticism. If Cuvier could throw aside the fossil excavated in 1828 by Boue, the French geologist, only because the anatomist thought himself wiser than his colleague, and would not believe that human skeletons could be found eighty feet deep in the mud of the Rhine; and if the French Academy could discredit the assertions of Boucher de Perthes, in 1846, only to be criticised in its turn in 1860, when the truth of de Perthes' discoveries and observations was fully confirmed by the whole body of geologists finding flint weapons in the drift-gravels of northern France; and if McEnery's testimony, in 1825, to the fact that he had discovered worked flints, together with the remains of extinct animals, in Kent's Hole Cavern ** was laughed at; and that of
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
Thus fact after fact has been discredited. From all sides we hear constant complaints. "Very little is known of psychology!" sighs one F. R. S. "We must confess that we know little, if anything, in physiology," says another. "Of all sciences, there is none which rests upon so uncertain a basis as medicine," reluctantly testifies a third. "What do we know about the presumed nervous fluids? . . . Nothing, as yet," puts in a fourth one; and so on in every branch of science. And, meanwhile, phenomena, surpassing in interest all others of nature, and to be solved only by physiology, psychology, and the "as yet unknown" fluids, are either rejected as delusions, or, if even true, "do not interest" scientists. Or, what is still worse, when a subject, whose organism exhibits in itself the most important features of such occult though natural potencies, offers his person for an investigation, instead of an honest experiment being attempted with him he finds himself entrapped by a scientist (?) and paid for his trouble with a sentence of three months' imprisonment! This is indeed promising.
It is easy to comprehend that a fact given in 1731, testifying to another fact which happened during the papacy of Paul III., for instance, is disbelieved in 1876. And when scientists are told that the Romans preserved lights in their sepulchres for countless years by the oiliness of gold; and that one of such ever-burning lamps was found brightly burning in the tomb of Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, notwithstanding that the tomb had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years, *--they have a certain right to doubt, and even disbelieve the statement, until they assure themselves, on the evidence of their own senses, that such a thing is possible. In such a case they can reject the testimony of all the ancient and medieval philosophers. The burial of living fakirs and their subsequent resuscitation, after thirty days of inhumation, may have a suspicious look to them. So also with the self-infliction of mortal wounds, and the exhibition of their own bowels to the persons present by various lamas, who heal such wounds almost instantaneously.
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
But what matters it if they do deny? Can they prevent phenomena taking place in the four corners of the world, if their skepticism were a thousand times more bitter? Fakirs will still be buried and resuscitated, gratifying the curiosity of European travellers; and lamas and Hindu ascetics will wound, mutilate, and even disembowel themselves, and find themselves all the better for it; and the denials of the whole world will not blow sufficiently to extinguish the perpetually-burning lamps in certain of the subterranean crypts of India, Thibet, and Japan. One of such lamps is mentioned by the Rev. S. Mateer, of the London Mission. In the temple of Trevandrum, in the kingdom of Travancore, South India, "there is a deep well inside the temple, into which immense riches are thrown year by year, and in another place, in a hollow covered by a stone, a great golden lamp, which was lit over 120 years ago, still continues burning," says this missionary in his description of the place. Catholic missionaries attribute these lamps, as a matter of course, to the obliging services of the devil. The more prudent Protestant divine mentions the fact, and makes no commentary. The Abbe Huc has seen and examined one of such lamps, and so have other people whose good luck it has been to win the confidence and friendship of Eastern lamas and divines. No more can be denied the wonders seen by Captain Lane in Egypt; the Benares experiences of Jacolliot and those of Sir Charles Napier; the levitations of human beings in broad daylight, and which can be accounted for only on the explanation given in the Introductory chapter of the present work. * Such levitations are testified to--besides Mr. Crookes--by Professor Perty, who shows them produced in open air, and lasting sometimes twenty minutes; all these phenomena and many more have happened, do, and will happen in every country of this globe, and that in spite of all the skeptics and scientists that ever were evolved out of the Silurian mud.
Taking no account of exaggerations, and putting aside as mere unsupported negation the affirmation by modern science of the impossibility of such lamps, we would ask whether, in case these inextinguishable fires are found to have really existed in the ages of "miracles," the lamps burning at Christian shrines and those of Jupiter, Minerva, and other Pagan deities, ought to be differently regarded. According to certain theologians, it would appear that the former (for Christianity also claims such lamps) have burned by a divine, miraculous power, and that the light of the latter, made by "heathen" art, was supported by the wiles of the devil. Kircher and Licetus show that they were ordered in these two diverse ways. The lamp at Antioch, which burned 1500 years, in an open and public place, over the door of a church, was preserved by the "power of God," who "hath made so infinite a number of stars to burn with perpetual light." As to the Pagan lamps, St. Augustine assures us they were the work of the devil, "who deceives us in a thousand ways." What more easy for Satan to do than represent a flash of light, or a bright flame to them who first enter into such a subterranean cave? This was asserted
Chemists and physicists deny that perpetual lamps are possible, alleging that whatever is resolved into vapor or smoke cannot be permanent, but must consume; and as the oily nutriment of a lighted lamp is exhaled into a vapor, hence the fire cannot be perpetual for want of food. Alchemists, on the other hand, deny that all the nourishment of kindled fire must of necessity be converted into vapor. They say that there are things in nature which will not only resist the force of fire and remain inconsumable, but will also prove inextinguishable by either wind or water. In an old chemical work of the year 1700, called Νεκροκεδεια, the author gives a number of refutations of the claims of various alchemists. But though he denies that a fire can be made to burn perpetually, he is half-inclined to believe it possible that a lamp should burn several hundred years. Besides, we have a mass of testimony from alchemists who devoted years to these experiments and came to the conclusion that it was possible.
There are some peculiar preparations of gold, silver, and mercury; also of naphtha, petroleum, and other bituminous oils. Alchemists also name the oil of camphor and amber, the Lapis asbestos seu Amianthus, the Lapis Carystius, Cyprius, and Linum vivum seu Creteum, as employed for such lamps. They affirm that such matter can be prepared either of gold or silver, reduced to fluid, and indicate that gold is the fittest pabulum for their wondrous flame, as, of all metals, gold wastes the least when either heated or melted, and, moreover, can be made to reabsorb its oily humidity as soon as exhaled, so continuously feeding its own flame when it is once lighted. The Kabalists assert that the secret was known to Moses, who had learned it from the Egyptians; and that the lamp ordered by the "Lord" to burn on the tabernacle, was an inextinguishable lamp. "And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil-olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always" (Exod. xxvii. 20).
Licetus also denies that these lamps were prepared of metal, but on
Asbestos, which was known to the Greeks under the name of Ασβεστος, or inextinguishable, is a kind of stone, which once set on fire
Dr. Grew, in his description of the curiosities in Gresham College
Asbestinus Lapis and Amianthus all one, and calls them in English the thrum-stone"; he says it grows in short threads or thrums, from about a quarter of an inch to an inch in length, parallel and glossy, as fine as those small, single threads the silk-worms spin, and very flexible like to flax or tow. That the secret is not altogether lost is proved by the fact that some Buddhist convents in China and Thibet are in possession of it. Whether made of the fibre of one or the other of such stones, we cannot say, but we have seen in a monastery of female Talapoins, a yellow gown, such as the Buddhist monks wear, thrown into a large pit, full of glowing coals, and taken out two hours afterward as clear as if it had been washed with soap and water.
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
Similar severe trials of asbestos having occurred in Europe and America in our own times, the substance is being applied to various industrial purposes, such as roofing-cloth, incombustible dresses and fireproof safes. A very valuable deposit on Staten Island, in New York harbor, yields the mineral in bundles, like dry wood, with fibres of several feet in length. The finer variety of asbestos, called αμιαντος (undefiled) by the ancients, took its name from its white, satin-like lustre.
The ancients made the wick of their perpetual lamps from another stone also, which they called Lapis Carystius. The inhabitants of the city of Carystos seemed to have made no secret of it, as Matthaeus Raderus says in his work * that they "kemb'd, spun, and wove this downy stone into mantles, table-linen, and the like, which when foul they purified again with fire instead of water." Pausanias, in Atticus, and Plutarch ** also assert that the wicks of lamps were made from this stone; but Plutarch adds that it was no more to be found in his time. Licetus is inclined to believe that the perpetual lamps used by the ancients in their sepulchres had no wicks at all, as very few have been found; but Ludovicus Vives is of a contrary opinion and affirms that he has seen quite a number of them.
Licetus, moreover, is firmly persuaded that a "pabulum for fire may be given with such an equal temperament as cannot be consumed but after a long series of ages, and so that neither the matter shall exhale
* speaking of lamps which have burned many hundred years, included in small bodies, observes that "this proceeds from the purity of the oil, which yields no fuliginous exhalations to suffocate the fire; for if air had nourished the flame, then it had not continued many minutes, for it would certainly in that case have been spent and wasted by the fire." But he adds, "the art of preparing this inconsumable oil is lost."
Not quite; and time will prove it, though all that we now write should be doomed to fail, like so many other truths.
We are told, in behalf of science, that she accepts no other mode of investigation than observation and experiment. Agreed; and have we not the records of say three thousand years of observation of facts going to prove the occult powers of man? As to experiment, what better opportunity could have been asked than the so-called modern phenomena have afforded? In 1869, various scientific Englishmen were invited by the London Dialectical Society to assist in an investigation of these phenomena. Let us see what our philosophers replied. Professor Huxley wrote: "I have no time for such an inquiry, which would involve much trouble and (unless it were unlike all inquiries of that kind I have known) much annoyance. . . . I take no interest in the subject . . . but supposing the phenomena to be genuine--they do not interest me." ** Mr. George H. Lewes expresses a wise thing in the following sentence: "When any man says that phenomena are produced by no known physical laws, he declares he knows the laws by which they are produced." *** Professor Tyndall expresses doubt as to the possibility of good results at any seance which he might attend. His presence, according to the opinion of Mr. Varley, throws everything in confusion. **** Professor Carpenter writes, "I have satisfied myself by personal investigation, that, whilst a great number of what pass as such (i.e., spiritual manifestations) are the results of intentional imposture, and many others of self-deception, there are certain phenomena which are quite genuine, and must be considered as fair subjects of scientific study . . . the source of these phenomena does not lie in any communication ab-extra, but depends upon the subjective condition of the individual which operates according to certain recognized physiological laws . . . the process to which I have given the name 'unconscious cerebration' . . . performs a
And it is thus that the world is apprised through the organ of exact science, that unconscious cerebration has acquired the faculty of making the guitars fly in the air and forcing furniture to perform various clownish tricks!
So much for the opinions of the English scientists. The Americans have not done much better. In 1857, a committee of Harvard University warned the public against investigating this subject, which "corrupts the morals and degrades the intellect." They called it, furthermore, "a contaminating influence, which surely tends to lessen the truth of man and the purity of woman." Later, when Professor Robert Hare, the great chemist, defying the opinions of his contemporaries, investigated spiritualism, and became a believer, he was immediately declared non compos mentis; and in 1874, when one of the New York daily papers addressed a circular letter to the principal scientists of this country, asking them to investigate, and offering to pay the expenses, they, like the guests bidden to the supper, "with one consent, began to make excuses."
Yet, despite the indifference of Huxley, the jocularity of Tyndall, and the "unconscious cerebration" of Carpenter, many a scientist as noted as either of them, has investigated the unwelcome subject, and, overwhelmed with the evidence, become converted. And another scientist, and a great author--although not a spiritualist--bears this honorable testimony: "That the spirits of the dead occasionally revisit the living, or haunt their former abodes, has been in all ages, in all European countries, a fixed belief, not confined to rustics, but participated in by the intelligent. . . . If human testimony on such subjects can be of any value, there is a body of evidence reaching from the remotest ages to the present time, as extensive and unimpeachable as is to be found in support of anything whatever." **
Unfortunately, human skepticism is a stronghold capable of defying any amount of testimony. And to begin with Mr. Huxley, our men of science accept of but so much as suits them, and no more.
"Oh shame to men! devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds,--men only disagree
Of creatures rational. . . ." ***
How can we account for such divergence of views among men taught out of the same text-books and deriving their knowledge from the same
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
This profound observer might have added to his experience that of Bacon, who remarks that ". . . a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to religion."
Professor Carpenter vaunts the advanced philosophy of the present day which "ignores no fact however strange that can be attested by valid evidence"; and yet he would be the first to reject the claims of the ancients to philosophical and scientific knowledge, although based upon evidence quite "as valid" as that which supports the pretensions of men of our times to philosophical or scientific distinction. In the department of science, let us take for example the subjects of electricity and electro-magnetism, which have exalted the names of Franklin and Morse to so high a place upon our roll of fame. Six centuries before the Christian era, Thales is said to have discovered the electric properties of amber; and yet the later researches of Schweigger, as given in his extensive works on Symbolism, have thoroughly demonstrated that all the ancient mythologies were based on the science of natural philosophy, and show that the most occult properties of electricity and magnetism were known to the theurgists of the earliest Mysteries recorded in history, those of Samothrace. Diodorus, of Sicily, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician--the oldest of historians--tell us that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, centuries and probably thousands of years prior to the historical period. One of the best proofs of it we find in a most remarkable picture, in Raoul-Rochette's Monuments d'Antiquite Figures, in which, like the "erect-haired Pan," all the figures have their hair streaming out in every direction--except the central figure of the Kabeirian Demeter, from whom the power issues, and one other, a kneeling man. * The picture, according to Schweigger, evidently represents a part of the ceremony of initiation. And yet it is not so long since the elementary works on natural philosophy began to be ornamented with cuts of electrified heads, with hair
Our physicists pride themselves on the achievements of our century and exchange antiphonal hymns of praise. The eloquent diction of their class-lectures, their flowery phraseology, require but a slight modification to change these lectures into melodious sonnets. Our modern Petrarchs, Dantes, and Torquato Tassos rival with the troubadours of old in poetical effusion. In their unbounded glorification of matter, they sing the amorous commingling of the wandering atoms, and the loving interchange of protoplasms, and lament the coquettish fickleness of "forces" which play so provokingly at hide-and-seek with our grave professors in the great drama of life, called by them "force-correlation." Proclaiming matter sole and autocratic sovereign of the Boundless Universe, they would forcibly divorce her from her consort, and place the widowed queen on the great throne of nature made vacant by the exiled spirit. And now, they try to make her appear as attractive as they can by incensing and worshipping at the shrine of their own building. Do they forget, or are they utterly unaware of the fact, that in the absence of its
LIFE!
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
In what particular is the knowledge of the present century so superior to that of the ancients? When we say knowledge we do not mean that brilliant and clear definition of our modern scholars of particulars to the most trifling detail in every branch of exact science; of that tuition which finds an appropriate term for every detail insignificant and microscopic as it may be; a name for every nerve and artery in human and animal organisms, an appellation for every cell, filament, and rib in a plant; but the philosophical and ultimate expression of every truth in nature.
The greatest ancient philosophers are accused of shallowness and a superficiality of knowledge of those details in exact sciences of which the moderns boast so much. Plato is declared by his various commentators to have been utterly ignorant of the anatomy and functions of the human body; to have known nothing of the uses of the nerves to convey sensations; and to have had nothing better to offer than vain speculations concerning physiological questions. He has simply generalized the divisions of the human body, they say, and given nothing reminding us of anatomical facts. As to his own views on the human frame, the microcosmos being in his ideas the image in miniature of the macrocosmos, they are much too transcendental to be given the least attention by our exact and materialistic skeptics. The idea of this frame being, as well as the universe, formed out of triangles, seems preposterously ridiculous to several of his translators. Alone of the latter, Professor Jowett, in his introduction to the Timaeus, honestly remarks that the modern physical philosopher "hardly allows to his notions the merit of being 'the dead men's bones' out of which he has himself risen to a higher knowledge"; * forgetting how much the metaphysics of olden times has helped the "physical" sciences of the present day. If, instead of quarrelling with the insufficiency and at times absence of terms and definitions strictly scientific in Plato's works, we analyze them carefully, the Timaeus, alone, will be found to contain within its limited space the germs of every new discovery. The circulation of the blood and the law of gravitation are clearly mentioned, though the former fact, it may be, is not so clearly defined as to withstand the reiterated attacks of modern
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
Plato's method, like that of geometry, was to descend from universals to particulars. Modern science vainly seeks a first cause among the permutations of molecules; the former sought and found it amid the majestic sweep of worlds. For him it was enough to know the great scheme of creation and to be able to trace the mightiest movements of the universe through their changes to their ultimates. The petty details, whose observation and classification have so taxed and demonstrated the patience of modern scientists, occupied but little of the attention of the old philosophers. Hence, while a fifth-form boy of an English school can prate more learnedly about the little things of physical science than Plato himself, yet, on the other hand, the dullest of Plato's disciples could tell more about great cosmic laws and their mutual relations, and demonstrate a familiarity with and control over the occult forces which lie behind them, than the most learned professor in the most distinguished academy of our day.
This fact, so little appreciated and never dwelt upon by Plato's translators, accounts for the self-laudation in which we moderns indulge at the expense of that philosopher and his compeers. Their alleged mistakes in anatomy and physiology are magnified to an inordinate extent to gratify our self-love, until, in acquiring the idea of our own superior learning, we lose sight of the intellectual splendor which adorns the ages of the past; it is as if one should, in fancy, magnify the solar spots until he should believe the bright luminary to be totally eclipsed.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves.
It requires no little moral courage in a man of eminent professional position to do justice to the acquirements of the ancients, in the face of a public sentiment which is content with nothing else than their abasement. When we meet with a case of the kind we gladly lay a laurel at the feet of the bold and honest scholar. Such is Professor Jowett, Master of Balliol College, and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who, in his translation of Plato's works, speaking of "the physical philosophy of the ancients as a whole," gives them the following
In short, the Platonic philosophy was one of order, system, and proportion; it embraced the evolution of worlds and species, the correlation and conservation of energy, the transmutation of material form, the indestructibility of matter and of spirit. Their position in the latter respect being far in advance of modern science, and binding, the arch of their
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
The foregoing facts do not seem to show that the ancients had merely "some knowledge of optics." Therefore, totally disagreeing in this particular with Professor Fiske and his criticism of Professor Draper's Conflict in his Unseen World, the only fault we find with the admirable book of Draper is that, as an historical critic, he sometimes uses his own optical instruments in the wrong place. While, in order to magnify the atheism of the Pythagorean Bruno, he looks through convex lenses; when-
It may be noted, as an example of the inaccuracy of current notions as to the scientific claims of the present century, that the discoveries of the indestructibility of matter and force-correlation, especially the latter, are heralded as among our crowning triumphs. It is "the most important discovery of the present century," as Sir William Armstrong expressed it in his famous address as president of the British Association. But, this "important discovery" is no discovery after all. Its origin, apart from the undeniable traces of it to be found among the old philosophers, is lost in the dense shadows of prehistoric days. Its first vestiges are discovered
The theory of "force-correlation," though it may be in the minds of our contemporaries "the greatest discovery of the age," can account for neither the beginning nor the end of one of such forces; neither can the theory point out the cause of it. Forces may be convertible, and one may produce the other, still, no exact science is able to explain the alpha and omega of the phenomenon. In what particular are we then in advance of Plato who, discussing in the Timaeus the primary and secondary qualities of matter ** and the feebleness of human intellect, makes Timaeus say: "God knows the original qualities of things; man can only hope to attain to probability." We have but to open one of the several pamphlets of Huxley and Tyndall to find precisely the same confession; but they improve upon Plato by not allowing even God to know more than themselves; and perhaps it may be upon this that they base their claims of superiority? The ancient Hindus founded their doctrine of emanation and absorption on precisely that law. The Το Ον, the primordial point in the boundless circle, "whose circumference is nowhere, and the centre everywhere," emanating from itself all things, and manifesting them in the visible universe under multifarious forms; the forms interchanging, commingling, and, after a gradual transformation from the pure spirit (or the Buddhistic "nothing"), into the grossest matter, beginning to recede and as gradually re-emerge into their primitive state, which is the absorption into Nirvana ***--what else is this but correlation of forces?
that one should die that the other may live." They knew as well as our physicists, that when a force has disappeared it has simply been converted into another force. Though archaeology may not have discovered any ancient apparatus for such special conversions, it may nevertheless be affirmed with perfect reason and upon analogical deductions that nearly all the ancient religions were based on such indestructibility of matter and force--plus the emanation of the whole from an ethereal, spiritual fire--or the central sun, which is God or spirit, on the knowledge of whose potentiality is based ancient theurgic magic.
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
In the manuscript commentary of Proclus on magic he gives the following account: "In the same manner as lovers gradually advance from that beauty which is apparent in sensible forms, to that which is divine; so the ancient priests, when they considered that there is a certain alliance and sympathy in natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science from this mutual sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate, and the subordinate in the supreme; in the celestial regions, terrene properties subsisting in a causal and celestial manner; and in earth celestial properties, but according to a terrene condition."
Proclus then proceeds to point to certain mysterious peculiarities of
supercelestial essences, while every order of things proceeds gradually in a beautiful descent from the highest to the lowest. * For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities." **
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law--this was and is the basis of magic.
therefore they need only be ignored; and they feel much 'worritted' that fresh evidence should be adduced, and fresh converts made, some of whom are so unreasonable as to ask for a new trial on the ground that the former verdict was contrary to the evidence."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
"All this," he goes on to say, "affords excellent reason why the 'converts' should not be ridiculed for their belief; but something more to the purpose must be urged before 'the philosophers' can be expected to devote much of their time to the inquiry suggested. It ought to be shown that the well-being of the human race is to some important degree concerned in the matter, whereas the trivial nature of all ghostly conduct hitherto recorded is admitted even by converts!"
Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten has collected a great number of authenticated facts from secular and scientific journals, which show with what serious questions our scientists sometimes replace the vexed subject of "Ghosts and Goblins." She quotes from a Washington paper a report of one of these solemn conclaves, held on the evening of April 29th, 1854. Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, the venerable chemist, who was so universally respected for his individual character, as well as for his life-long labors for science, "was bullied into silence" by Professor Henry, as soon as he had touched the subject of spiritualism. "The impertinent action of one of the members of the 'American Scientific Association,' " says the authoress, "was sanctioned by the majority of that distinguished body and subsequently endorsed by all of them in their proceedings." * On the following morning, in the report of the session, the Spiritual Telegraph thus commented upon the events:
"It would seem that a subject like this"--(presented by Professor Hare) "was one which would lie peculiarly within the domain of 'science.' But the 'American Association for the Promotion of Science' ** decided
very "important degree."
It is sufficient for one to express belief in the existence of a mysterious sympathy between the life of certain plants and that of human beings, to assure being made the subject of ridicule. Nevertheless, there are many well-authenticated cases going to show the reality of such an affinity. Persons have been known to fall sick simultaneously with the uprooting of a tree planted upon their natal day, and dying when the tree died. Reversing affairs, it has been known that a tree planted under the same circumstances withered and died simultaneously with the person whose twin brother, so to speak, it was. The former would be called by Mr. Proctor an "effect of the imagination"; the latter a "curious coincidence."
Max Muller gives a number of such cases in his essay On Manners and Customs. He shows this popular tradition existing in Central America, in India, and Germany. He traces it over nearly all Europe; finds it among the Maori Warriors, in British Guiana, and in Asia. Reviewing Tyler's Researches into the Early History of Mankind, a work in which are brought together quite a number of such traditions, the great philologist very justly remarks the following: "If it occurred in Indian and German tales only, we might consider it as ancient Aryan property; but when we find it again in Central America, nothing remains but either to admit a later communication between European settlers and native American story-tellers . . . or to inquire whether there is not some intelligible and truly human element in this supposed sympathy between the life of flowers and the life of man."
The present generation of men, who believe in nothing beyond the superficial evidence of their senses, will doubtless reject the very idea of such a sympathetic power existing in plants, animals, and even stones. The caul covering their inner sight allows them to see but that which they cannot well deny. The author of the Asclepian Dialogue furnishes us with a reason for it, that might perhaps fit the present period and account for this epidemic of unbelief. In our century, as then, "there
We are at the bottom of a cycle and evidently in a transitory state. Plato divides the intellectual progress of the universe during every cycle into fertile and barren periods. In the sublunary regions, the spheres of the various elements remain eternally in perfect harmony with the divine nature, he says; "but their parts," owing to a too close proximity to earth, and their commingling with the earthly (which is matter, and therefore the realm of evil), "are sometimes according, and sometimes contrary to (divine) nature." When those circulations--which Eliphas Levi calls "currents of the astral light"--in the universal ether which contains in itself every element, take place in harmony with the divine spirit, our earth and everything pertaining to it enjoys a fertile period. The occult powers of plants, animals, and minerals magically sympathize with the "superior natures," and the divine soul of man is in perfect intelligence with these "inferior" ones. But during the barren periods, the latter lose their magic sympathy, and the spiritual sight of the majority of mankind is so blinded as to lose every notion of the superior powers of its own divine spirit. We are in a barren period: the eighteenth century, during which the malignant fever of skepticism broke out so irrepressibly, has entailed unbelief as an hereditary disease upon the nineteenth. The divine intellect is veiled in man; his animal brain alone philosophizes.
Formerly, magic was a universal science, entirely in the hands of the sacerdotal savant. Though the focus was jealously guarded in the sanctuaries, its rays illuminated the whole of mankind. Otherwise, how are we to account for the extraordinary identity of "superstitions," customs, traditions, and even sentences, repeated in popular proverbs so widely scattered from one pole to the other that we find exactly the same ideas among the Tartars and Laplanders as among the southern nations of Europe, the inhabitants of the steppes of Russia, and the aborigines of North and South America? For instance, Tyler shows one of the ancient Pythagorean maxims, "Do not stir the fire with a sword," as popular among a number of nations which have not the slightest connection with each other. He quotes De Plano Carpini, who found this tradition prevailing among the Tartars so far back as in 1246. A Tartar will not consent for any amount of money to stick a knife into the fire, or touch it with any sharp or pointed instrument, for fear of cutting the "head of the fire."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
Every sentence of Pythagoras, like most of the ancient maxims, has a dual signification; and, while it had an occult physical meaning, expressed literally in its words, it embodied a moral precept, which is explained by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras. This "Dig not fire with a sword," is the ninth symbol in the Protreptics of this Neo-platonist. "This symbol," he says, "exhorts to prudence." It shows "the propriety of not opposing sharp words to a man full of fire and wrath--not contending with him. For frequently by uncivil words you will agitate and disturb an ignorant man, and you will suffer yourself. . . . Herakleitus also testifies to the truth of this symbol. For, he says, 'It is difficult to fight with anger, for whatever is necessary to be done redeems the soul.' And this he says truly. For many, by gratifying anger, have changed the condition of their soul, and have made death preferable to life. But by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect." *
We have had misgivings sometimes; we have questioned the impartiality of our own judgment, our ability to offer a respectful criticism upon the labors of such giants as some of our modern philosophers--Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer, Carpenter, and a few others. In our immoderate love for the "men of old"--the primitive sages--we were always afraid to trespass the boundaries of justice and refuse their dues to those who deserve them. Gradually this natural fear gave way before an unexpected reinforcement. We found out that we were but the feeble echo of public opinion, which, though suppressed, has sometimes found relief in able articles scattered throughout the periodicals of the country. One of such can be found in the National Quarterly Review of December, 1875, entitled "Our Sensational Present-Day Philosophers." It is a very able article, discussing fearlessly the claims of several of our scientists to new discoveries in regard to the nature of matter, the human soul, the mind, the universe; how the universe came into existence, etc. "The religious world has been much startled," the author proceeds to say, "and not a
revamping stories which are nearly as old as the mountains.' " This would have been the simple truth; "but even scientists or philosophers," adds the author, "are not always proof against the weakness of encouraging any notion which they think may secure niches for them among the immortal Ones." *
Huxley, Tyndall, and even Spencer have become lately the great oracles, the "infallible popes" on the dogmas of protoplasm, molecules, primordial forms, and atoms. They have reaped more palms and laurels for their great discoveries than Lucretius, Cicero, Plutarch, and Seneca had hairs on their heads. Nevertheless, the works of the latter teem with ideas on the protoplasm, primordial forms, etc., let alone the atoms, which caused Demokritus to be called the atomic philosopher. In the same Review we find this very startling denunciation:
"Who, among the innocent, has not been astonished, even within the last year, at the wonderful results accomplished by oxygen? What an excitement Tyndall and Huxley have created by proclaiming, in their own ingenious, oracular way, just the very doctrines which we have just quoted from Liebig; yet, as early as 1840, Professor Lyon Playfair translated into English the most 'advanced' of Baron Liebig's works." **
"Another recent utterance," he says, "which startled a large number of innocent and pious persons, is, that every thought we express, or attempt to express, produces a certain wonderful change in the substance of the brain. But, for this and a good deal more of its kind, our philosophers had only to turn to the pages of Baron Liebig. Thus, for instance,
Thus, throughout the sensational lectures of Tyndall, we can trace, almost to a page, the whole of Liebig's speculations, interlined now and then with the still earlier views of Demokritus and other Pagan philosophers. A potpourri of old hypotheses elevated by the great authority of the day into quasi-demonstrated formulas, and delivered in that pathetic, picturesque, mellow, and thrillingly-eloquent phraseology so preeminently his own.
Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder's Philosophy of History.
"Priestley," adds the author, "was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher . . . was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen." It is in these works that "he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so 'startling,' 'bold,' etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers."
"Our readers," he proceeds to say, "remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new." "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation" (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his "protoplasm," but a rechauffe of the speculations of the Hindu Swabhavikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swabhava or their own nature? ** As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: "The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man
Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley's "mutton-protoplasm" is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist
244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution.
244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63.
245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119.
245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc.
248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor).
249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875.
249:** Ibid., p. 94.
250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151.
250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118.
251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96.
251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3.
252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, "We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the 'advanced' thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is." *
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul's immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists--to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth--are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul's immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preexistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boehius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, "who were no friends to the soul's immortality," as says Henry More, "Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence," and that "it does preexist before it comes into the body." **
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived,
Footnotes
206:* "Antidote," lib. i., cap. 4.
206:** "Letter to Glanvil, the author of 'Sadducismus Triumphatus,' May, 25, 1678."
207:* "History of Magic," vol. ii., p. 272.
207:** "Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement accuses de magie."
207:*** Berlin, 1817.
207:**** "Nova Medicina Spirituum," 1675.
207:***** "History of Magic."
208:* It would be a useless and too long labor to enter here upon the defence of Kepler's theory of relation between the five regular solids of geometry and the magnitudes of the orbits of five principal planets, rather derided by Prof. Draper in his "Conflict." Many are the theories of the ancients that have been avenged by modern discovery. For the rest, we must bide our time.
208:** "Magia Naturalis," Lugduni, 1569.
208:*** Athanasius Kircher: "Magnes sive de arte magnetici, opus tripartitum." Coloniae, 1654.
209:* Lib. iii., p. 643.
210:* "Notes from a New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam," by de la Louere, French Ambassador to Siam in the years 1687-8. Edition of 1692.
213:* Baptist Van Helmont: "Opera Omnia," 1682, p. 720, and others.
214:* De la Loubere: "Notes," etc. (see ante), p. 115.
214:** Ibid., p. 120.
214:*** Ibid., p. 63.
215:* See his "Conf.," xiii., 1. c. in praefatione.
215:** I Samuel, xvi., 14-23.
216:* "Aphorisms," 22.
216:** Ibid., p. 69.
216:*** Ibid., p. 70.
216:**** "Philosophie des Sciences Occultes."
217:* I Kings, i. 1-4, 15.
218:* Josephus: "Antiquities," viii., 2.
219:* "The Diakka and their Victims; an Explanation of the False and Repulsive in Spiritualism."
219:** See Chapter on the human spirits becoming the denizens of the eighth sphere, whose end is generally the annihilation of personal individuality.
219:*** Porphyry: "On the Good and Bad Demons."
219:**** "De Mysteriis Egyptorum," lib. iii., c. 5.
221:* Epes Sargent: "Proof Palpable of Immortality," p. 45.
221:** See Matthew xxiv. 26.
223:* See Wallace, "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," and W. Howitt, "History of the Supernatural," vol. ii.
223:** See Wallace's paper read before the Dialectical Society, in 1871: "Answer to Hume, etc."
224:* "Φιλολογος" (Bailey's), second edition.
225:* See Art. on "Æthrobacy."
226:* Psalm cv. 23. "The Land of Ham," or chem, Greek χεμι, whence the terms alchemy and chemistry.
227:* "Œdipi Ægyptiaci Theatrum Hieroglyphicum," p. 544.
227:** "Lib. de Defectu Oraculorum."
227:*** Lib. i., Class 3, Cap. ult.
228:* The details of this story may be found in the work of Erasmus Franciscus, who quotes from Pflaumerus, Pancirollus, and many others.
229:* "Sulphur. Alum ust. a
iv.; sublime them into flowers to
ij., of which add of crystalline Venetian borax (powdered)
j.; upon these affuse high rectified spirit of wine and digest it, then abstract it and pour on fresh; repeat this so often till the sulphur melts like wax without any smoke, upon a hot plate of brass: this is for the pabulum, but the wick is to be prepared after this manner: gather the threads or thrums of the Lapis asbestos, to the thickness of your middle and the length of your little finger, then put them into a Venetian glass, and covering them over with the aforesaid depurated sulphur or aliment, set the glass in sand for the space of twenty-four hours, so hot that the sulphur may bubble all the while. The wick being thus besmeared and anointed, is to be put into a glass like a scallop-shell, in such manner that some part of it may lie above the mass of prepared sulphur; then setting this glass upon hot sand, you must melt the sulphur, so that it may lay hold of the wick, and when it is lighted, it will burn with a perpetual flame and you may set this lamp in any place where you please."
The other is as follows:
"℞. Solis tosti, lb. j.; affuse over it strong wine vinegar, and abstract it to the consistency of oil; then put on fresh vinegar and macerate and distill it as before. Repeat this four times successively, then put into this vinegar vitr. antimonii subtilis loevigat, lb. j.; set it on ashes in a close vessel for the space of six hours, to extract its tincture, decant the liquor, and put on fresh, and then extract it again; this repeat so often till you have got out all the redness. Coagulate your extractions to the consistency of oil, and then rectify them in Balneo Mariae (bain Marie). Then take the antimony, from which the tincture was extracted, and reduce it to a very fine meal, and so put it into a glass bolthead; pour upon it the rectified oil, which abstract and cohobate seven times, till such time as the powder has imbibed all the oil, and is quite dry. This extract again with spirit of wine, so often, till all the essence be got out of it, which put into a Venice matrass, well luted with paper five-fold, and then distill it so that the spirit being drawn off, there may remain at the bottom an inconsumable oil, to be used with a wick after the same manner with the sulphur we have described before."
"These are the eternal lights of Tritenheimus," says Libavius, his commentator, "which indeed, though they do not agree with the pertinacy of naphtha, yet these things can illustrate one another. Naphtha is not so durable as not to be burned, for it exhales and deflagrates, but if it be fixed by adding the juice of the Lapis asbestinos it can afford perpetual fuel," says this learned person.
We may add that we have ourselves seen a lamp so prepared, and we are told that since it was first lighted on May 2, 1871, it has not gone out. As we know the person who is making the experiment incapable to deceive any one, being himself an ardent experimenter in hermetic secrets, we have no reason to doubt his assertion.
230:* "Commentary upon St. Augustine's 'Treatise de Civitate Dei.' "
230:** The author of "De Rebus Cypriis," 1566 A. D.
230:*** "Book of Ancient Funerals."
231:* "Comment. on the 77th Epigram of the IXth Book of Martial."
231:** "De Defectu Oraculorum."
232:* "Vulgar Errors," p. 124.
232:** "London Dialectical Society's Report on Spiritualism," p. 229.
232:*** Ibid., p. 230.
232:**** Ibid., p. 265.
233:* Ibid., p. 266.
233:** Draper: "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 121.
233:*** Milton: "Paradise Lost."
234:* See Ennemoser: "History of Magic," vol. ii., and Schweigger: "Introduction to Mythology through Natural History."
235:* "History of Magic," vol. ii.
236:* B. Jowett, M.A.: "The Dialogues of Plato," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 240.
238:** "Plutarch," translated by Langhorne.
238:*** Some kabalistic scholars assert that the Greek original Pythagoric sentences of Sextus, which are now said to be lost, existed still, in a convent at Florence, at that time, and that Galileo was acquainted with these writings. They add, moreover, that a treatise on astronomy, a manuscript by Archytas, a direct disciple of Pythagoras, in which were noted all the most important doctrines of their school, was in the possession of Galileo. Had some Ruffinas got hold of it, he would no doubt have perverted it, as Presbyter Ruffinas has perverted the above-mentioned sentences of Sextus, replacing them with a fraudulent version, the authorship of which he sought to ascribe to a certain Bishop Sextus. See Taylor's Introduction to Iamblichus' "Life of Pythagoras," p. xvii.
238:**** Jowett: Introduction to the "Timaeus," vol. ii., p. 508.
238:***** Ibid.
240:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 14.
241:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 311.
241:** "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 88.
242:* W. R. Grove: "Preface to the Correlation of Physical Forces."
242:** "Timaeus," p. 22.
242:*** Beginning with Godfrey Higgins and ending with Max Muller, every archaeologist 244:* This is the exact opposite of the modern theory of evolution. 244:** Ficinus: See "Excerpta" and "Dissertation on Magic"; Taylor: "Plato," vol. i., p. 63. 245:* "Modern American Spiritualism," p. 119. 245:** The full and correct name of this learned Society is--"The American Association
247:* See Taylor's translation of "Select Works of Plotinus," p. 553, etc. 248:* Iamblichus: "De Vita Pythag.," additional notes (Taylor). 249:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875. 249:** Ibid., p. 94. 250:* "Force and Matter," p. 151. 250:** Burnouf: "Introduction," p. 118. 251:* "The National Quarterly Review," Dec., 1875, p. 96. 251:** "De Anima," lib. i., cap. 3. 252:* De Maistre: "Soirees de St. Petersburg."