to assist the seer--the objects
arranged by the hands of the consultant that the accidents of his life
may be revealed to him,--this is the least inexplicable part of the
process. Everything in the material world is part of a series of causes
and effects. Nothing happens without a cause, every cause is a part of a
whole, and consequently the whole leaves its impression on the
slightest accident. Rabelais, the greatest mind among moderns, resuming
Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristophanes, and Dante, pronounced three
centuries ago that "man is a microcosm"--a little world. Three hundred
years later, the great seer Swedenborg declared that "the world was
a man." The prophet and the precursor of incredulity meet thus in the
greatest of all formulas.

Everything in human life is predestined, so it is also with the
existence of the planet. The least event, the most futile phenomena,
are all subordinate parts of a scheme. Great things, therefore, great
designs, and great thoughts are of necessity reflected in the smallest
actions, and that so faithfully, that should a conspirator shuffle and
cut a pack of playing-cards, he will write the history of his plot for
the eyes of the seer styled gypsy, fortune-teller, charlatan, or what
not. If you once admit fate, which is to say, the chain of links of
cause and effect, astrology has a _locus standi_, and becomes what
it was of yore, a boundless science, requiring the same faculty of
deduction by which Cuvier became so great, a faculty to be exercised
spontaneously, however, and not merely in nights of study in the closet.

For seven centuries astrology and divination have exercised an influence
not only (as at present) over the uneducated, but over the greatest
minds, over kings and queens and wealthy people. Animal magnetism, one
of the great sciences of antiquity, had its origin in occult philosophy;
chemistry is the outcome of alchemy; phrenology and neurology are no
less the fruit of similar studies. The first illustrious workers in
these, to all appearance, untouched fields, made one mistake, the
mistake of all inventors; that is to say, they erected an absolute
system on a basis of isolated facts for which modern analysis as yet
cannot account. The Catholic Church, the law of the land, and modern
philosophy, in agreement for once, combined to prescribe, persecute, and
ridicule the mysteries of the Cabala as well as the adepts; the result
is a lamentable interregnum of a centur