credulity and falsehood, its reign would never
have endured so long. But that its art took
its origin in singular phenomena, proper to
certain affections of the nerves, or manifested in
the conditions of sleep. These phenomena, the
principle of which was at first unknown, served
to root faith in magic, and often abused even
enlightened minds. The enchanters and
magicians arrived, by divers practices, at the faculty
of provoking in other brains a determined order
of dreams, of engendering hallucinations of all
kinds, of inducing fits of hypnotism, trance,
mania, during which the persons so affected
imagined that they saw, heard, touched
supernatural beings, conversed with them, proved
their influences, assisted at prodigies of which
magic proclaimed itself to possess the secret.
The public, the enchanters, and the enchanted,
were equally dupes.'* Accepting this explanation,
unintelligible to no physician of a practice
so lengthened as mine has been, I draw from it
the corollary that as these phenomena are
exhibited only by certain special affections, to
which only certain special constitutions are
susceptible, so not in any superior faculties of
intellect, or of spiritual endowment, but in
peculiar physical temperaments, often strangely
disordered, the power of the sorcerer in affecting
the imagination of others, is to be sought.
In the native tribes of Australasia the elders
are instructed in the arts of this so-called
sorcery, but only in a very few constitutions
does instruction avail to produce effects in
which the savages recognise the powers of a
sorcerer; it is so with the Obi of the negroes.
The fascination of Obi is an unquestionable fact,
but the Obi man cannot be trained by formal
lessons; he is born a fascinator, as a poet is
born a poet. It is so with the Laplanders, of
whom Tornæus reports that of those instructed
in the magical art ' only a few are capable of it.'
' Some,' he says, ' are naturally magicians.' And
this fact is emphatically insisted upon by the
mystics of our own middle ages, who state that
a man must be born a magician; in other words,
that the gift is constitutional, though developed
by practice and art. Now, that this gift and
its practice should principally obtain in imperfect
states of civilisation, and fade into insignificance
in the busy social enlightenment of cities, may
be accounted for by reference to the known
influences of imagination. In the cruder states
of social life not only is imagination more
frequently predominant over all other faculties,
but it has not the healthful vents which the
intellectual competition of cities and civilisation
affords. The man who in a savage tribe, or in
the dark feudal ages, would be a magician, is in
our century a poet, an orator, a daring speculator,
an inventive philosopher. In other words,
his imagination is drawn to pursuits congenial
to those amongst whom it works. It is the
tendency of all intellect to follow the directions
of the public opinion amidst which it is
trained. Where a magician is held in
reverence or awe, there will be more practitioners
of magic than where a magician is despised
as an impostor or shut up as a lunatic. In
Scandinavia, before the introduction of
Christianity, all tradition records the wonderful powers
of the Vala, or witch, who was then held in
reverence and honour. Christianity was
introduced, and the early Church denounced the
Vala as the instrument of Satan, and from that
moment down dropped the majestic prophetess
into a miserable and execrated old hag!"

* La Magie et l'Astrologie dans I'Antiquité et au
Moyen-Age. Par L. F. Alfred Maury, Membre de
I'Institut. P. 225.

"The ideas you broach," said I, musingly,
"have at moments crossed me, though I have
shrunk from reducing them to a theory which
is but one of pure hypothesis. But this magic,
after all, then, you would place in the imagination
of the operator, acting on the imagination
of those whom it affects. Here, at least, I can
follow you, to a certain extent, for here we get
back into the legitimate realm of physiology."

"And possibly," said Faber, "we may find
hints to guide us to useful examination, if not
to complete solution, of problems that, once
demonstrated, may lead to discoveries of infinite
value—hints, I say, in two writers of widely
opposite genius—Van Helmont and Bacon. Van
Helmont, of all the mediæval mystics, is, in spite
of his many extravagant whims, the one whose
intellect is the most suggestive to the
disciplined reasoners of our day. He supposed that
the faculty which he calls Phantasy, and which
we familiarly call Imagination, is invested with
the power of creating for itself ideas
independent of the senses, each idea clothed in a
form fabricated by the imagination, and
becoming an operative entity. This notion is so
far favoured by modern physiologists, that
Lincke reports a case where the eye itself was
extirpated; yet the extirpation was followed by
the appearance of luminous figures before the
orbit. And again, a woman, stone blind,
complained 'of luminous images, with pale colours,
before her eyes.' Abercrombie mentions the
case ' of a lady quite blind, her eyes being also
disorganised and sunk, who never walked out
without seeing a little old woman in a red cloak
who seemed to walk before her.'* Your favourite
authority, the illustrious Müller, who was
himself in the habit of ' seeing different images
in the field of vision when he lay quietly
down to sleep,' asserts that these images are
not merely presented to the fancy, but that
even 'the images of dreams are really seen'
and that 'any one may satisfy himself of
this by accustoming himself regularly to open
his eyes when waking after a dream, the images
seen in the dream are then sometimes visible,
and can be observed to disappear gradually.'
He confirms this statement, not only by the
result of his owen experience, but by the
observations made by Spinoza, and the yet higher

* She had no illusions when within doors.—
Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers, p. 277.
(15th edition.)