When the Christian religion triumphed, it brought humanity under a discipline that puts a rein upon this deplorable mysticism. But how many times has it brought back, under the reign of spiritual religion, all the extravagances of the religions of nature! It was to appear especially at the _renaissance_ of the schools and of the genius of Paganism in the sixteenth century, when the human mind had broken with the philosophy of the Middle Age, without yet having arrived at modern philosophy.[94] The Paracelsuses and the Von Helmonts renewed the Apolloniuses and the Jamblicuses, abusing some chemical and medical knowledge, as the former had abused the Socratic and Platonic method, altered in its character, and turned from its true object. And so, in the midst of the eighteenth century, has not Swedenborg united in his own person an exalted mysticism and a sort of magic, opening thus the way to those senseless[95] persons who contest with me in the morning the solidest and best-established proofs of the existence of the soul and God, and propose to me in the evening to make me see otherwise than with my eyes, and to make me hear otherwise than with my ears, to make me use all my faculties otherwise than by their natural organs, promising me a superhuman science, on the condition of first losing consciousness, thought, liberty, memory, all that constitutes me an intelligent and moral being. I should know all, then, but at the cost of knowing nothing that I should know. I should elevate myself to a marvellous world, which, awakened and in a natural state, I am not even able to suspect, of which no remembrance will remain to me:--a mysticism at once gross and chimerical, which perverts both psychology and physiology; an imbecile ecstasy, renewed without genius from the Alexandrine ecstasy; an extravagance which has not even the merit of a little novelty, and which history has seen reappearing at all epochs of ambition and impotence.