Bindsfeldt, &c. &c., the few isolated truths that may lie in them. For, frequent though they may be throughout the world, nowhere have lies and deceit freer play than where Nature's laws are avowedly set aside, nay declared invalid. Here therefore we find the wildest fictions, the strangest freaks of the imagination worked up into an edifice, lofty as the skies, on the narrow foundation of the slight particle of truth there may have been in Magic, and in consequence of this, the most sanguinary atrocities perpetrated age after age. In contemplating such things, the psychological reflection on the unlimited capability of the human intellect for accepting the most incredible absurdities and the readiness of the human heart to set its seal to them by cruelty, prevails over every other. [299] Delrio. "Disqu. Mag." L. III. P. 2, q. 4. 4, s. 7--and Bodinus, "Mag. Dæmon," iii. 2. [300] See note 2, p. 334, especially pp. 40, 41, and Nos. 89, 91, and 97 of Most's book. [301] Kieser, "Archiv. f. t. M." See the account of Bende Bensen's illness, vol. ix. to vol. xii. [302] Plutarch, "Symposiacæ quæstionis," qu. v. 7. 6. 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 philosophy as well as to other branches of knowledge.--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 mysteries 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 _à priori_, therefore unconditionally, all prescience of future events, all apparitions of absent, of dying, let alone of deceased persons, and all 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 themselves, it must be obviously premature to reject all foreknowledge, all apparitions and all magic; since that rejection is based upon laws, whose _à priori_ character precisely restricts them to phenomena; whereas things in themselves, to which even our own inner self must belong, remain untouched by them.