ve them, whereas they are phenomena that want a better settlement.
You speak, too, of the "doctrine of chances." If chance have a
doctrine, it is subject to a rule, is under calculation, arithmetic,
and loses all trace at once of our idea of absolute chance. If there
be chance, there is also a power over chance. The very hairs of our
head, which seem to be but a chance-confusion, are yet, we are
assured, all numbered--and is it less credible that their every
movement is noted also? One age is the type of another; and every age,
from the beginning of the world, hath had its own symbols; and not
poetically only, but literally true is it, that "coming events cast
their shadows before." If the "vox populi" be the "vox Dei," it has
pronounced continually, in a space of above five thousand years, that
there is communication between the material and immaterial worlds. So
rare are the exceptions, that, speaking of mankind, we may assert that
there is a universal belief amongst them of that connexion by signs,
omens, dreams, visions, or ghostly presences. Many professed sceptics,
who have been sceptics only in the pride of understanding, have in
secret bowed down to one form or other of the superstition. Take not
the word in a bad sense. It is at least the germ, the natural germ,
of religion in the human mind. It is the consciousness of a
superiority not his own, of some power so immeasurably above man, that
his mind cannot take it in, but accepts, as inconsiderable glimpses of
it, the phenomena of nature, and the fears and misgivings of his own
mind, spreading out from himself into the infinite and invisible. I am
not certain, Eusebius, if it be not the spiritual part of conscience,
and is to it what life is to organized matter--the mystery which gives
it all its motion and beauty.

It is not my intention to repeat the substance of my former letter--I
therefore pass on. You ask me if the mesmeric phenomena--which you
ridicule, yet of which I believe you covet a closer investigation--are
not part and parcel of the same incomprehensible farrago? I cannot
answer you. It would be easy to do so were I a disciple. If the
mesmerists _can_ establish _clairvoyance_, it will certainly be upon a
par with the ancient oracles. But what the philosopher La Place says,
in his _Essay on Probabilities_, may be worth your consideration--that
"any case, however apparently incredible, if it is a recurrent case,
is as much entitled to a fair valuati