The aim of this work is the gathering of such facts and phenomena as may serve to throw light upon the nature of the magic powers with which man is undoubtedly endowed.

CONTENTS:Witchcraft, Black and White Magic, Dreams, Visions, Ghosts, Divination, Possession, Magnetism, Miraculous Cures, Mysticism

Its end will be attained if it succeeds in showing that he actually does possess powers which are not subject to the general laws of nature, but more or less independent of space and time, and which yet make themselves known partly by appeals to the ordinary senses and partly by peculiar phenomena, the result of their activity.

These higher powers, operating exclusively through the spirit of man, are part of his nature, which has much in common with that of the Deity, since he was created by God in His own image, and the Lord breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.

This soul is not, as materialists maintain, merely the sum of all perceptions obtained by the collective activity of bodily organs-a conclusion which would finally make it the product of mere material atoms, subject to constant physical and chemical changes.

Even if it were possible-which we deny-to reduce our whole inner life, including memory, imagination, and reason, to a system of purely physical laws, and thus to admit its destruction at the moment of death, there would still remain the living soul, coming directly from the Most High, and destined to continue throughout eternity.

This soul is, hence, independent of time. Nor is it bound by space, except so far as it can commune with the outer world only by means of the body, with which it is united in this life. The nature of this union is a mystery as yet unfathomed, but precisely because it is such a mystery, we have no right to assume that it is altogether indissoluble during life; or, that it ceases entirely at the moment of death.

There is, on the contrary, overwhelming evidence that the soul may, at times, act independently of the body, and the forces developed on such occasions we have, for the sake of convenience rather than on account of the special fitness of the term, preferred to call magic powers.

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...Father Spee, a most learned man, writing against the ceaseless persecutions of pretended witches, nevertheless declared, in 1631, in his renowned Cautio criminalis, by far the best work written on that side of the question, that there are in the world some few wizards and enchanters, which could not be denied by any body without frivolity and great ignorance, and even Bayle, while condemning the cruelty of witches trials,[Pg 21] seriously proposes to punish witches for their ill-will.

...Nor must it be forgotten that the age in which these trials mainly occurred was emphatically an age of superstition; from the prince on his throne to the clown in his hut, everybody learnt and practiced some kind of magic; the ablest statesmen and the subtlest philosophers, the wisest divines and the most learned physicians, all were more or less adepts of the Black Art, and many among them became eminently dangerous to their fellow-beings.