"You are the very persons whose arrival I have been expecting, and whom it has cost me much trouble to summon," he said. "You are the spirits of the nineteenth century, conjured to appear before a man of the fifteenth. You are called from the ante-chambers where the souls of the unborn await their entrance upon earth. But the images of the century to which your future mortal life belongs dwell in the depths of your consciousness. These images you shall show me. It is for this that I have summoned you, for I wish to cast a glance into the future." I was seized with a strange, almost horrid feeling. I now remembered that I and my companions had transported ourselves, by the use of means which stirs up the entire reproductive forces of the imagination, from the actual nineteenth century, back to the long-past fifteenth, that we might see it live before our eyes, not in dissevered traits as a past age is wont to be preserved in books, but in the completeness of its own multi-formity. Who was right, the magician or myself? Which was the one only seemingly living, he or I? At what hour did the hand on the clock of time point at that moment? Granted that time is absolutely nothing but a conceptual form without independent reality; as long as I live in time I believe in its ordered course, and do not wish to see its golden thread entangled. I did not wish that the spirit which I had summoned should be my master and degrade me to a product of his own imagination. I summoned courage and exclaimed:-- "We have wandered through many cities, great magician, to find you. We finally stand in this your sanctuary. We see these gloomy Gothic arches over our heads; we see your venerable figure before us; we behold these folios and strange instruments which surround you; we look out through these windows and behold on one side towers and house-tops, on the other fields, meadows and the huts of serfs, and yonder in the distance the castle of a knight who is suspected of night-attacks upon the trains of the merchants as they approach the city. All these things stand real and present before our eyes: but, nevertheless, great magician, it is all, yourself included, a product of _our_ magic, of the power of our own imagination, not of _your_ magic. It is in order to make some acquaintance with the latter that we are come. It is not we who are to answer your questions, but you ours." The magician smiled. He persisted in his view, and I in mine. The contested question could not be decided, and it was laid aside. But along with my consciousness of belonging to a period of critical activity, my doubts had awakened--my vivid hope a moment ago of finding in magic the key of all secrets, was fast fading away.