tion of the heart, do not usually
terminate suddenly: it was so with Volktman.

One day he was alone with Godolphin, and their conversation turned upon
one of the doctrines of the old Magnetism, a doctrine which, depending
as it does so much upon a seeming reference to experience, survived the
rest of its associates, and is still not wholly out of repute among the
wild imaginations of Germany.

"One of the most remarkable and abstruse points in what students
call metaphysics," said Volktman, "is sympathy! the first principle,
according to some, of all human virtue. It is this, say they, which
makes men just, humane, charitable. When one who has never heard of the
duty of assisting his neighbour, sees another drowning, he plunges into
the water and saves him. Why? because involuntarily, and at once, his
imagination places himself in the situation of the stranger: the pain he
would experience in the watery death glances across him: from this pain
he hastens,--without analysing its cause, to deliver himself.

"Humanity is thus taught him by sympathy: where is this sympathy
placed?--in the nerves: the nerves are the communicants with outward
nature; the more delicate the nerves, the finer the sympathies; hence,
women and children are more alive to sympathy than men. Well, mark me:
do not these nerves have attraction and sympathy---not only with human
suffering, but with the powers of what is falsely termed inanimate
nature? Do not the wind, the influences of the weather and the seasons,
act confessedly upon them? and if one part of nature, why not another,
inseparably connected too with that part? If the weather and seasons
have sympathy with the nerves, why not the moon and the stars, by
which the weather and the seasons are influenced and changed? Ye of the
schools may allow that sympathy originates some of our actions; I say it
governs the whole world--the whole creation! Before the child is born,
it is this secret affinity which can mark and stamp him with the witness
of his mother's terror or his mother's desire."

"Yet," said Godolphin, "you would scarcely, in your zeal for sympathy,
advocate the same cause as Edricius Mohynnus, who cured wounds by a
powder, not applied to the wound, but to the towel that had been dipped
in its blood?"

"No," answered Volktman: "it is these quacks and pretenders that have
wronged all sciences, by clamouring for false deductions. But I do
believe of sympathy, that it has a power t