tamen insidens, animantiumque sustentaculum id cognoscendum, edax et rursus genitale_” (Lect. 13, 16 vers. Schlegel). Certainly we fall here into mystical and figurative language, but it is the only language in which anything can be said on this entirely transcendent theme. So this simile also may pass. The human race may be imagined as an _animal compositum_, a form of life of which many polypi, especially those which swim, such as _Veretillum_, _Funiculina_, and others, afford examples. As in these the head isolates each individual animal, and the lower part, with the common stomach, combines them all in the unity of one life process, so the brain with its consciousness isolates the human individual, while the unconscious part, the vegetative life with its ganglion system, into which in sleep the brain‐consciousness disappears, like a lotus which nightly sinks in the flood, is a common life of all, by means of which in exceptional cases they can even communicate, as, for example, occurs when dreams communicate themselves directly, the thoughts of the mesmeriser pass into the somnambulist, and finally also in the magnetic or generally magical influence proceeding from intentional willing. Such an influence, if it occurs, is _toto genere_ different from every other on account of the _influxus physicus_ which takes place, for it is really an _actio in distans_ which the will, certainly proceeding from the individual, yet performs in its metaphysical quality as the omnipresent substratum of the whole of nature. One might also say that as in the _generatio æquivoca_ there sometimes and as an exception appears a weak residue of the original _creative power_ of the will, which in the existing forms of nature has already done its work and is extinguished, so there may be, exceptionally, acting in these magical influences, as it were, a surplus of its original _omnipotence_, which completes its work and spends itself in the construction and maintenance of the organisms. I have spoken fully of this magical property of the will in “The Will in Nature,” and I gladly omit here discussions which have to appeal to uncertain facts, which yet cannot be altogether ignored or denied. Chapter XXVI.(4) On Teleology.