A Strange Story — CompleteLytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
Science
A Strange Story — Complete
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century
(10) I may add that Dr. Kerner instances the effect of laurel-berries
on the Seeress of Prevorst, corresponding with that asserted by Julius
Faber in the text.
(11) See for these unguents the work of M. Maury, before quoted, “La
Magic et l’Astrologie,” etc., p. 417.
(12) It seems extremely doubtful whether the very few instances in
which it has been asserted that a savage race has been found without
recognition of a Deity and a future state would bear searching
examination. It is set forth, for example, in most of the popular works
on Australia, that the Australian savages have no notion of a Deity or
a Hereafter, that they only worship a devil, or evil spirit. This
assumption, though made more peremptorily, and by a greater number of
writers than any similar one regarding other savages, is altogether
erroneous, and has no other foundation than the ignorance of the
writers. The Australian savages recognize a Deity, but He is too august
for a name in their own language; in English they call Him the Great
Master,--an expression synonymous with “The Great Lord.” They believe
in a hereafter of eternal joy, and place it amongst the stars.--See
Strzelecki’s Physical Description of New South Wales.
(13) See the observations on La Place and La Marck in the Introduction
to Kirby’s “Bridgewater Treatise.”
CHAPTER LXXII.
I turned back alone. The sun was reddening the summits of the distant
mountain-range, but dark clouds, that portended rain, were gathering
behind my way and deepening the shadows in many a chasm and hollow which
volcanic fires had wrought on the surface of uplands undulating like
diluvian billows fixed into stone in the midst of their stormy swell. I
wandered on and away from the beaten track, absorbed in thought. Could
I acknowledge in Julius Faber’s conjectures any basis for logical
ratiocination; or were they not the ingenious fancies of that empirical
Philosophy of Sentiment by which the aged, in the decline of severer
faculties, sometimes assimilate their theories to the hazy romance of
youth? I can well conceive that the story I tell will be regarded by
most as a wild and fantastic fable; that by some it may be considered a
vehicle for guesses at various riddles of Nature, without or within
us, which are free to the license of romance, though forbidden to the
caution of science. But, I--I--know unmistakably my own identity, my
own positive place in a substantial universe. And beyond that knowledge,
what do I know? Yet had Faber no ground for his startling parallels
between the chimeras of superstition and the alternatives to faith
volunteered by the metaphysical speculations of knowledge? On the
theorems of Condillac, I, in common with numberless contemporaneous
students (for, in my youth, Condillac held sway in the schools, as now,
driven forth from the schools, his opinions float loose through the
talk and the scribble of men of the world, who perhaps never opened his
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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