Perhaps the greatest number of miracles ever performed in the world were pulled off by the Devil at the tomb of Abbe Paris from 1727 to 1749. The sick were cured, the deaf made to hear and the blind to see. Often a young girl among the convulsionaries would bend back into an arc, her loins supported by the sharpened point of an iron rod, and beg to be pounded with a fifty pound stone suspended from the ceiling. The stone was allowed to fall repeatedly with all its weight upon her abdomen, and the girl enjoyed it and cried for more, and no injury was found upon her person. When violent blows were struck with a sledge-hammer upon a drill held against her stomach she cried out: “O! how delightful, that does me good. Strike twice as hard if you can.”—Isis Unveiled. CHAPTER XI Life Cells. I Am the I Am, the Hebrew God, is supposed by Christians to be the First Cause, but the assumption of a first cause is quite unnecessary, and further, if you postulate a creative god, some impertinent person might ask you who made God. It is just as well to start with matter, in which mind and energy are inherent, which is eternal, infinite, immortal, self-existent and sustaining, requiring no supreme power as a basis or background, as set forth in the Sankhya System of the Hindus. See Phil. & Relig. of India, 55. The attraction or love of one mass of matter for another is the energy. It is that love that creates all forms. The atoms go a-chasing after other atoms, even as you and I. There can be no attraction without mind. Anaxagoras and Empedocles believed in a dualism of mind and matter. The latter says: “The periods of the formation of the world depend upon the alternate prevalence of love and hate. During certain periods all heterogeneous atoms are separated from each other by hate, during others they are everywhere united by love.” Haeckel says: “These three fundamental attributes, matter, force and sensation, are found inseparably united throughout the whole universe in every atom and every molecule.” Edgar Allan Poe says: “That which is not matter is not at all. The ultimate unparticled matter not only permeates all things but impels all things. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought’ is this matter in motion. The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence is what men call mind. The motion of the unparticled matter is the universal thought of the universal mind. This thought creates. All things are but the thought of God. For new individualities gross matter is necessary. To create individual, thinking beings, it was necessary to incarnate portions of the Divine Mind. Thus man is individualized. Divested of corporate investiture, he were God.” According to the Ionic philosophy matter is by nature endowed with life, and life is inseparably connected with matter.—Ueberweg’s Hist. of Philosophy, 1-32.