EMANUEL SWEDENBORG in one place writes: "Magic is nothing but the perversion of order; it is especially the abuse of correspondences."(2) A study of the ceremonial magic of the Middle Ages and the following century or two certainly justifies SWEDENBORG in writing of magic as something evil. The distinction, rigid enough in theory, between white and black, legitimate and illegitimate, magic, was, as I have indicated, extremely indefinite in practice. As Mr A. E. WAITE justly remarks: "Much that passed current in the west as White (_i.e_. permissible) Magic was only a disguised goeticism, and many of the resplendent angels invoked with divine rites reveal their cloven hoofs. It is not too much to say that a large majority of past psychological experiments were conducted to establish communication with demons, and that for unlawful purposes. The popular conceptions concerning the diabolical spheres, which have been all accredited by magic, may have been gross exaggerations of fact concerning rudimentary and perverse intelligences, but the wilful viciousness of the communicants is substantially untouched thereby."(1b) (2) EMANUEL SWEDENBORG: _Arcana Caelestia_, SE 6692. (1b) ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE: _The Occult Sciences_ (1891), p. 51. These "psychological experiments" were not, save, perhaps, in rare cases, carried out in the spirit of modern psychical research, with the high aim of the man of science. It was, indeed, far otherwise; selfish motives were at the root of most of them; and, apart from what may be termed "medicinal magic," it was for the satisfaction of greed, lust, revenge, that men and women had recourse to magical arts. The history of goeticism and witchcraft is one of the most horrible of all histories. The "Grimoires," witnesses to the superstitious folly of the past, are full of disgusting, absurd, and even criminal rites for the satisfaction of unlawful desires and passions. The Church was certainly justified in attempting to put down the practice of magic, but the means adopted in this design and the results to which they led were even more abominable than witchcraft itself. The methods of detecting witches and the tortures to which suspected persons were subjected to force them to confess to imaginary crimes, employed in so-called civilised England and Scotland and also in America, to say nothing of countries in which the "Holy" Inquisition held undisputed sway, are almost too horrible to describe. For details the reader may be referred to Sir WALTER SCOTT'S _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_ (1830), and (as concerns America) COTTON MATHER'S The _Wonders of the Invisible World_ (1692). The credulous Church and the credulous people were terribly afraid of the power of witchcraft, and, as always, fear destroyed their mental balance and made them totally disregard the demands of justice. The result may be well illustrated by what almost inevitably happens when a country goes to war; for war, as the Hon.