lf 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 evidence
was derived of the prodigious faculties at the command of the Being of
Action, which, according to Lambert, can abstract itself completely from
the Being of Reaction, bursting its envelope, and piercing walls by its
potent vision; a phenomenon known to the Hindoos, as missionaries tell
us, by the name of _Tokeiad_; or again, by another faculty, can grasp
in the brain, in spite of its closest convolutions, the ideas which are
formed or forming there, and the whole of past consciousness.

"If apparitions are not impossible," said Lambert, "they must be due
to a faculty of discerning the ideas which represent man in his purest
essence, whose life, imperishable perhaps, escapes our grosser senses,
though they may become perceptible to the inner being when it has
reached a high degree of ecsta