of Christ till that of Descartes, between faith and doubt, how could
men help accounting for the mysteries of our nature otherwise than by
divine interposition? Of whom but of God Himself could sages demand an
account of an invisible creature so actively and so reactively
sensitive, gifted with faculties so extensive, so improvable by use,
and so powerful under certain occult influences, that they could
sometimes see it annihilate, by some phenomenon of sight or movement,
space in its two manifestations--Time and Distance--of which the
former is the space of the intellect, the latter is physical space?
Sometimes they found it reconstructing the past, either by the power
of retrospective vision, or by the mystery of a palingenesis not
unlike the power a man might have of detecting in the form,
integument, and embryo in a seed, the flowers of the past, and the
numberless variations of their color, scent, and shape; and sometimes,
again, it could be seen vaguely foreseeing the future, either by its
apprehension of final causes, or by some phenomenon of physical
presentiment.

Other men, less poetically religious, cold, and argumentative--quacks
perhaps, but enthusiasts in brain at least, if not in heart
--recognizing some isolated examples of such phenomena, admitted their
truth while refusing to consider them as radiating from a common
centre. Each of these was, then, bent on constructing a science out of
a simple fact. Hence arose demonology, judicial astrology, the black
arts, in short, every form of divination founded on circumstances that
were essentially transient, because they varied according to men's
temperament, and to conditions that are still completely unknown.

But from these errors of the learned, and from the ecclesiastical
trials under which fell so many martyrs to their own powers, startling