orce that exists and which includes all others namely Motion, the
breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe. Species
are too distinctly separated for the human hand to mingle them. The only
miracle of which man is capable is done through the conjunction of
two antagonistic substances. Gunpowder for instance is germane to a
thunderbolt. As to calling forth a creation, and a sudden one, all
creation demands time, and time neither recedes nor advances at the word
of command. So, in the world without us, plastic nature obeys laws the
order and exercise of which cannot be interfered with by the hand of
man. But after fulfilling, as it were, the function of Matter, it would
be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of a gigantic
power, the effects of which are so incommensurable that the known
generations of men have never yet been able to classify them. I do not
speak of man's faculty of abstraction, of constraining Nature to
confine itself within the Word,--a gigantic act on which the common
mind reflects as little as it does on the nature of Motion, but which,
nevertheless, has led the Indian theosophists to explain creation by
a word to which they give an inverse power. The smallest atom of their
subsistence, namely, the grain of rice, from which a creation issues and
in which alternately creation again is held, presented to their minds so
perfect an image of the creative word, and of the abstractive word, that
to them it was easy to apply the same system to the creation of worlds.
The majority of men content themselves with the grain of rice sown in
the first chapter of all the Geneses. Saint John, when he said the
Word was God only complicated the difficulty. But the fructification,
germination, and efflorescence of our ideas is of little consequence if
we compare that property, shared by many men, with the wholly
individual faculty of communicating to that property, by some mysterious
concentration, forces that are more or less active, of carrying it up
to a third, a ninth, or a twenty-seventh power, of making it thus fasten
upon the masses and obtain magical results by condensing the processes
of nature.

"What I mean by enchantments," continued Wilfrid after a moment's pause,
"are those stupendous actions taking place between two membranes in the
tissue of the brain. We find in the unexplorable nature of the Spiritual
World certain beings armed with these wondrous faculties, compara