In proportion as a man has them, he is partaker of a
Divine nature. He can rise no higher, and he needs no more. Platonists
had said--No, that is only virtue; and virtue is the means, not the end.
We want proof of having something above that; something more than any
man of the herd, any Christian slave, can perform; something above
nature; portents and wonders. So they set to work to perform wonders;
and succeeded, I suppose, more or less. For now one enters into a whole
fairyland of those very phenomena which are puzzling us so nowadays--
ecstasy, clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by the
effect of what we now call mesmerism. They are all there, these modern
puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone seekers for wisdom. It
makes us love them, while it saddens us to see that their difficulties
were the same as ours, and that there is nothing new under the sun. Of
course, a great deal of it all was "imagination." But the question
then, as now is, what is this wonder-working imagination?--unless the
word be used as a mere euphemism for lying, which really, in many cases,
is hardly fair. We cannot wonder at the old Neoplatonists for
attributing these strange phenomena to spiritual influence, when we see
some who ought to know better doing the same thing now; and others, who
more wisely believe them to be strictly physical and nervous, so utterly
unable to give reasons for them, that they feel it expedient to ignore
them for awhile, till they know more about those physical phenomena
which can be put under some sort of classification, and attributed to
some sort of inductive law.
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