arcanum, for delusion. Whence these sudden leaps from one extreme to the other? What is it that constantly removes from your eyes the real point of view from which you ought to see things? The source of this evil is within yourself; I will point it out to you, lest you discover it too late. You have an innate propensity, which has been nursed up by your lively imagination, a propensity which is agitating powerfully within you, and struggles for gratification, the propensity to the wonderful. Your tutor strove too late to combat it by the dry speculations of philosophy, instead of guiding and confining it in proper bounds. My God! your friend is an excellent man, who had your real happiness at heart; however, his philosophy was not altogether consistent. A preconceived contempt of all occult sciences prevented him examining them with impartiality, and declaring all events contrary to the common course of nature, to be the effects of imposition. He committed a sin against philosophy, premising as demonstrated, what was to be proved. Your own feeling, my Lord, made you sensible of the defects and exaggerations of his arguments; your reason was not sufficient to rectify, or to refute them; and thus you have adopted the principles of your tutor, not from conviction, but from a blind confidence in his learning and honesty, and believing the assertions of your instructor, you believed in his philosophy.” “Hiermanfor! I think you are right.” “Give me leave to proceed. It was consequently not philosophical conviction that made you suspect your inclination to the wonderful; but faith was opposed to faith. The former was founded on the authority of your tutor, and the latter on the secret voice of your heart. Regard for your friend, and the ambition of being looked upon as a philosopher, impelled you to adopt the principles of your tutor, and an innate instinct spurred you to yield to the voice of your heart, and thus you embraced by turns, the opinion of your instructor and the faith which originated from your heart, according to the strength of motive which prevailed on either side. However, these motives were never pure undoubted arguments of reason, but mere sentiments, which made you shift from one side to the other, in the same measure in which your sentiments of one or the other kind, received nourishment or additional strength from without. As soon as I began to play off my magical machineries your belief in miracles began to prevail; but as soon as your tutor recapitulated his lectures, philosophy resumed her former sway. You were a ball which flew alternately in his and my hands, because you wanted firm conviction, to fix yourself upon. Nevertheless I should have succeeded at last in getting an exclusive power over you merely by means of my delusions, because your predilection for the wonderful, and your imagination, which found an excuse and a gratification in my works, would have prevailed over the philosophical sentences which you have