and literatures
so little professable (to coin a word) as the literatures of the North
(which, so far from providing lessons, stand very badly in need of
them); when the curriculum is full of the everlasting lectures on
Shakespeare and the sixteenth century,--it is strange that some one has
not restored the teaching of the occult philosophies, once the glory of
the University of Paris, under the title of anthropology. Germany, so
childlike and so great, has outstripped France in this particular;
in Germany they have professors of a science of far more use than a
knowledge of the heterogeneous philosophies, which all come to the same
thing at bottom.

Once admit that certain beings have the power of discerning the future
in its germ-form of the Cause, as the great inventor sees a glimpse of
the industry latent in his invention, or a science in something that
happens every day unnoticed by ordinary eyes--once allow this, and there
is nothing to cause an outcry in such phenomena, no violent exception
to nature's laws, but the operation of a recognized faculty; possibly a
kind of mental somnambulism, as it were. If, therefore, the hypothesis
upon which the various ways of divining the future are based seem
absurd, the facts remain. Remark that it is not really more wonderful
that the seer should foretell the chief events of the future than that
he should read the past. Past and future, on the sceptic's system,
equally lie beyond the limits of knowledge. If the past has left traces
behind it, it is not improbable that future events have, as it were,
their roots in the present.

If a fortune-teller gives you minute details of past facts known only
to yourself, why should he not foresee the events to be produced by
existing causes? The world of ideas is cut out, so to speak, on the
pattern of the physical world; the same phenomena should be discernible
in both, allowing for the difference of the medium. As, for instance,
a corporeal body actually projects an image upon the atmosphere--a
spectral double detected and recorded by the daguerreotype; so also
ideas, having a real and effective existence, leave an impression, as it
were, upon the atmosphere of the spiritual world; they likewise produce
effects, and exist spectrally (to coin a word to express phenomena for
which no words exist), and certain human beings are endowed with the
faculty of discerning these "forms" or traces of ideas.

As for the material means employed