A great deal was nevertheless still wanting ere this fundamental thought, from which Magic seems properly to have sprung, could pass over at once into distinct consciousness and be recognised _in abstracto_, and ere Magic could at once understand itself. Only a few thoughtful and learned writers of former ages--as I mean soon to prove by quotations--express the distinct thought, that it is in _the will_ itself that the magic power lies, and that the strange signs and acts together with the senseless words that accompanied them, which passed for the means of exorcising and the connecting link with demons, are in fact merely vehicles and means for fixing _the will_, by which the act of volition, which is to act magically, ceases to be mere wish and becomes deed, or, to use the language of Paracelsus, "receives a _corpus_," and the individual will in a sense distinctly proclaims that it is now acting as general will, as will in itself. For in every act of Magic--charm-cure or whatever else it may be--the outward action (the connecting link) is exactly what the passes are in magnetising: _i.e._ not what is really essential, but the mere vehicle, that by which the will, the only real agent, is directed and fixed in the material world and enters into reality. As a rule therefore, it is indispensable.--From the rest of the writers of those times we gather that, in conformity with that fundamental thought of Magic, their only aim was to obtain absolute, arbitrary power over Nature. But they were unable to elevate themselves to the thought that this power must be a _direct_ one; they conceived it, on the contrary, absolutely as an _indirect_ one. For all religions in all countries had placed Nature under the dominion of gods and of demons. Now, it was the magician's endeavour to subject these gods and demons to his will, to induce, nay, to force them to serve him; and he attributed all that he succeeded in achieving to their agency, just as Mesmer attributed the success of his Magnetism to the magnetic rods he held in his hands, instead of to his will which was the real agent. It was in this sense that all polytheistic nations took the matter, and even Plotinus,[305] but more especially Iamblichus, understood Magic: that is, as _Theurgy_, an expression which Porphyry was the first to use. That divine aristocracy, Pantheism, was favourable to this interpretation, since it distributed the dominion over the different forces of Nature among as many gods and demons--mostly mere personifications of natural forces--and the magician, by persuasion or by force, subjected now one, now the other of these divinities to his power and made them do his bidding. But in a Divine Monarchy, where all Nature obeys a single ruler, the thought of contracting a private alliance with the Almighty, let alone of exercising sovereignty over him, would have been too audacious. Therefore where Judaism, Christianity or Islam prevailed,