Persons who of old were afflicted in manner that was then called bewitchment, and others through or from whom the afflictions were alleged to proceed, are now extensively supposed to have possessed organizations, temperaments, and properties which rendered them exceptionally pliant under subtile forces, either magnetic, mesmeric, or psychological, and who, consequently, at times, could be, and were, made ostensible utterers of knowledge whose marvelousness indicated mysterious source, and ostensible performers of acts deemed more than natural, and which, in fact, were the productions of wills not native in the manifesting forms. The special forces that produced bewitchment and are put in application now, do not become sensibly operative upon any other mortals than peculiar sensitives; and their action upon such is often most easily and effectively manifested through aid obtained from other similar sensitives. Selections of both subjects and instrumentalities were of old, and are now, controlled by general law. Steel needles and iron-filings are not selected by the magnet's free will when it forces them to leap up from their resting-places and cleave to itself. Seeming levitation possesses them, and an invisible force takes them whither gravitation, their usual holder, would not let them go. It is upon steel, not lead--upon iron, not stone--that the magnet can execute its marvelous liftings. Nature's conditions fix selections. The organizations, temperaments, fluids, solids, and all the various properties, are, to some extent, unlike in any two human bodies whatsoever, and the range of the differings and consequent susceptibilities is very wide. A psychological magnet in either the seen or unseen may have power to draw certain human forms to contact with itself, and to use them as its tools, and yet lack force to produce sensible effects upon but few in the mass of living men. Where its action is most efficient, it controls the movements of what it holds in its embrace--takes a human form out from control by the spirit which usually governs it, and through that form manifests its own powers and purposes. Both the reputed bewitched and bewitching may severally have had but little, if any, voluntary part in manifesting the remarkable phenomena that were imputed to them. Where physical organs are used, the public is prone to deem the performances intentional acts by those whose forms are operated, while yet the wills of those whose forms are visibly concerned in marvelous works may have been formerly, as they often now are, little else than unwilling, and in many cases unconscious tools.