Plutarch, of course, could know nothing of the language in use to-day, but it is clear that he was familiar with some or all of the phaenomena, which in our times have received a vocabulary of their own, for the moment very impressive. Psychopathic, auto-suggestion, telepathy, the subliminal self--the words may tell us something; whether what they tell us is verifiable, remains to be seen. Plutarch's account of the facts, for the description of which this language has been invented, seems even more fantastic to a modern reader, but it must be remembered that he and his contemporaries were led to it at once by observation of psychical phaenomena, still to be observed, and by philosophic speculation on the transcendence of God. As a body of theories, the ancient system holds together as well as most systems in the abstract. It was not in theory that it broke down. Plutarch as usual presents it with reservations. {101} [Sidenote: The mantic art] The daemons are not slow to speak; it is we who are slow to hear. "In truth we men recognize one another's thoughts, as it were feeling after them in the dark by means of the voice. But the thoughts of the daemons are luminous and shine for those who can see; and they need no words or names, such as men use among themselves as symbols to see images and pictures of what is thought, while, as for the things actually thought, those they only know who have some peculiar and daemonic light. The words of the daemons are borne through all things, but they sound only for those who have the untroubled nature and the still soul--those, in fact, whom we call holy and happy (_daimonious_)."[93] Most people think the daemon only comes to men when they are asleep, but this is due to their want of harmony. "The divine communicates immediately (_di autou_) with few and but rarely; to most men it gives signs, from which rises the so-called Mantic art"[94]--prophecy or soothsaying. All souls have the "mantic" faculty--the capacity for receiving impressions from daemons--though not in an equal degree. A daemon after all is, from one point of view, merely a disembodied soul, and it may meet a soul incorporated in a body; and thus, soul meeting soul, there are produced "impressions of the future,"[95] for a voice is not needed to convey thought.