authority of Aristotle, who accounts for
spectral appearance as the internal action of the
sense of vision.* And this opinion is favoured
by Sir David Brewster, whose experience leads
him to suggest 'that the objects of mental
contemplation may be seen as distinctly as external
objects, and will occupy the same local position
in the axis of vision as if they had been formed
by the agency of light.' Be this as it may, one
fact remains, that images can be seen even by
the blind as distinctly and as vividly as you
and I now see the stream below our feet and
the opossums at play upon yonder boughs.
Let us come next to some remarkable suggestions
of Lord Bacon. In his Natural History,
treating of the force of the imagination, and
the help it receives ' by one man working by
another,' he cites an instance he had witnessed
of a kind of juggler, who could tell a person
what card he thought of. He mentioned this
' to a pretended learned man, curious in such
things,' and this sage said to him, ' It is not the
knowledge of the man's thought, for that is
proper to God, but the enforcing of a thought
upon him, and binding his imagination by a
stronger, so that he could think of no other
card.' You see this sage anticipated our modern
electro-biologists! And the learned man then
shrewdly asked Lord Bacon, ' Did the juggler
tell the card to the man himself who had thought
of it, or bid another tell it?' ' He bade another
tell it,' answered Lord Bacon. 'I thought so,'
returned his learned acquaintance, ' for the juggler
himself could not have put on so strong an
imagination; but by telling the card to the other,
who believed the juggler was some strange man
who could do strange things,—that other man
caught a strong imagination.'† The whole story
is worth reading, because Lord Bacon evidently
thinks it conveys a guess worth examining. And
Lord Bacon, were he now living, would be the
man to solve the mysteries that branch out of
mesmerism or (so called) spiritual manifestation, for
he would not pretend to despise their phenomena
for fear of hurting his reputation for good sense.
Bacon then goes on to state that there are three
ways to fortify the imagination. ' First, authority
derived from belief in an art and in the man
who exercises it; secondly, means to quicken
and corroborate the imagination; thirdly, means
to repeat and refresh it.' For the second and
the third he refers to the practices of magic;
and proceeds afterwards to state on what things
imagination has most force; ' upon things that
have the lightest and easiest motions, and,
therefore, above all, upon the spirits of men,
and, in them, on such affections as move lightest
—in love, in fear, in irresolution. And, 'adds
Bacon, earnestly, in a very different spirit from
that which dictates to the sages of our time
the philosophy of rejecting without trial that
which belongs to the Marvellous, 'and whatsoever
is of this kind, should be thoroughly inquired
into.' And this great founder or renovator of
the sober inductive system of investigation, even
so far leaves it a matter of speculative inquiry
whether imagination may not be so powerful that
it can actually operate upon a plant, that he says,
' This likewise should be made upon plants, and
that diligently, as if you should tell a man that
such a tree would die this year, and will him, at
these and these times, to go unto it and see how
it thriveth.' I presume that no philosopher has
followed such recommendations; had some great
philosopher done so, possibly we should by this
time know all the secrets of what is popularly
called witchcraft."

* Müller, Physiology of the Senses, Baley's
translation, pp. 1068-1395, and elsewhere. Mr. Bain, in
his thoughtful and suggestive work on the Senses
and Intellect, makes very powerful use of these
statements in support of his proposition, which
Faber advances in other words, viz. ' the return of
the nervous currents exactly on their old track in
revived sensations.'

† Perhaps it is for the reason suggested in the
text, viz. that the magician requires the interposition
of a third imagination between his own and that
of the consulting believer, that any learned adept in
(so called) magic will invariably refuse to exhibit
without the presence of a third person. Hence
the author of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute
Magie, printed at Paris, 1852-53—a book less
remarkable for its learning than for the earnest belief
of a scholar of our own day in the reality of the art
of which he records the history—insists much on
the necessity of rigidly observing Le Ternaire, in
the number of persons who assist in an enchanter's
experiments.

And as Faber here paused there came a
strange laugh from the fantastic she oak-tree
overhanging the stream—a wild, impish laugh.

"Pooh! it is but the great kingfisher, the
laughing bird of the Australian bush," said
Julius Faber, amused at my start of superstitious
alarm.

We walked on for some minutes in musing
silence, and the rude log hut in which my wise
companion had his home came in view; the
flocks grazing on undulous pastures, the kine
drinking at a watercourse fringed by the slender
gum-trees; and a few fields, laboriously won
from the luxuriant grass-land, rippling with the
wave of corn.

I halted, and said, " Rest here for a few
moments, till I gather up the conclusions to which
your speculative reasoning seems to invite me."

We sat done on a rocky crag, half mantled by
luxuriant creepers with vermilion buds.

"From the guesses," said I, " which you
have drawn from the erudition of others and
your own ingenious and reflective inductions,
I collect this solution of the mysteries, by
which the experience I gain from my senses
confounds all the dogmas approved by my
judgment. To the rational conjectures by
which, when we first conversed on the marvels
that perplexed me, you ascribed to my imagination,
predisposed by mental excitement, physical
fatigue, or derangement, and a concurrence of
singular events tending to strengthen such
predisposition,—the phantasmal impressions
produced on my senses; to these conjectures you
now add a new one, more startling and less
admitted by sober physiologists. You conceive