sy, or a great perfection of vision."

I know--though my remembrance is now vague--that Lambert, by following
the results of Mind and Will step by step, after he had established
their laws, accounted for a multitude of phenomena which, till then,
had been regarded with reason as incomprehensible. Thus wizards, men
possessed with second sight, and demoniacs of every degree--the victims
of the Middle Ages--became the subject of explanations so natural, that
their very simplicity often seemed to me the seal of their truth. The
marvelous gifts which the Church of Rome, jealous of all mysteries,
punished with the stake, were, in Louis' opinion, the result of certain
affinities between the constituent elements of matter and those of mind,
which proceed from the same source. The man holding a hazel rod when
he found a spring of water was guided by some antipathy or sympathy
of which he was unconscious; nothing but the eccentricity of these
phenomena could have availed to give some of them historic certainty.

Sympathies have rarely been proved; they afford a kind of pleasure which
those who are so happy as to possess them rarely speak of unless they
are abnormally singular, and even then only in the privacy of intimate
intercourse, where everything is buried. But the antipathies that arise
from the inversion of affinities have, very happily, been recorded when
developed by famous men. Thus, Bayle had hysterics when he heard water
splashing, Scaliger turned pale at the sight of water-cress, Erasmus was
thrown into a fever by the smell of fish. These three antipathies were
connected with water. The Duc d'Epernon fainted at the sight of a hare,
Tycho-Brahe at that of a fox, Henri III. at the presence of a cat, the
Marechal d'Albret at the sight of a wild hog; these antipathies
were produced by animal emanations, and often took effect at a great
distance. The Chevalier de Guise, Marie de Medici, and many other
persons have felt faint at seeing a rose even in a painting. Lord Bacon,
whether he were forewarned or no of an eclipse of the moon, always fell
into a syncope while it lasted; and his vitality, suspended while
the phenomenon lasted was restored as soon as it was over without his
feeling any further inconvenience. These effects of antipathy, all well
authenticated, and chosen from among many which history has happened
to preserve, are enough to give a clue to the sympathies which remain
unknown.

This fragment of Lambert's