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ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND MAGIC.
most sanguinary atrocities perpetrated age after age. In
contemplating such things, the psychological reflection on
the unlimited capability of the human intellect for accept
ing the most incredible absurdities and the readiness of
the human heart to set its seal to them by cruelty, prevails
over every other.
Yet the modification which has taken place of late in the
views of German savants respecting magic, is not due
exclusively to Animal Magnetism. The deep foundations
of it had already been laid by the change in philosophy
wrought by Kant, which makes German culture differ
fundamentally from that of the rest of Europe, with
respect to knowledge.
philosophy as well as to other branches of
For a man to be able to smile beforehand at
all occult sympathies, let alone magical influences, he must
find the world very, nay completely, intelligible. But this
is only possible if he looks at it with the utterly superficial
glance which puts away from it all suspicion that we
human beings are immersed in a sea of riddles and mys
teries and have no exhaustive knowledge or understanding
either of things or of ourselves in any direct way. Nearly
all
great men have been of the opposite frame of mind
and therefore, whatever age or nation they belonged to,
have always betrayed a slight tinge of superstition. If
our natural mode of knowing were one that handed over
to us things in themselves immediately and consequently
gave us the absolutely true relations and connections of
things, we might then, no doubt, be justified in rejecting a
priori, therefore unconditionally, all prescience of future
events, all apparitions of
deceased persons, and all
absent, of dying, let alone of
magical influence. But if all
that we know is, as Kant teaches, mere phenomenon, the
forms and laws of which do not extend to things in them
selves, it must be obviously premature to reject all fore
knowledge, all apparitions and all magic; since that