rdered, the power of the sorcerer
in affecting the imagination of others is to be sought. In the native
tribes of Australasia the elders are instructed in the arts of this
so-called sorcery, but only in a very few constitutions does instruction
avail to produce effects in which the savages recognize the powers of a
sorcerer: it is so with the Obi of the negroes. The fascination of Obi
is an unquestionable fact, but the Obi man cannot be trained by formal
lessons; he is born a fascinator, as a poet is born a poet. It is so
with the Laplanders, of whom Tornoeus reports that of those instructed
in the magical art 'only a few are capable of it.' 'Some,' he says, 'are
naturally magicians.' And this fact is emphatically insisted upon by
the mystics of our own middle ages, who state that a man must be born
a magician; in other words, that the gift is constitutional, though
developed by practice and art. Now, that this gift and its practice
should principally obtain in imperfect states of civilization, and fade
into insignificance in the busy social enlightenment of cities, may be
accounted for by reference to the known influences of imagination. In
the cruder states of social life not only is imagination more frequently
predominant over all other faculties, but it has not the healthful vents
which the intellectual competition of cities and civilization affords.
The man who in a savage tribe, or in the dark feudal ages, would be a
magician, is in our century a poet, an orator, a daring speculator,
an inventive philosopher. In other words, his imagination is drawn to
pursuits congenial to those amongst whom it works. It is the tendency
of all intellect to follow the directions of the public opinion amidst
which it is trained. Where a magician is held in reverence or awe, there
will be more practitioners of magic than where a magician is despised
as an impostor or shut up as a lunatic. In Scandinavia, before the
introduction of Christianity, all tradition records the wonderful
powers of the Vala, or witch, who was then held in reverence and honour.
Christianity was introduced, and the early Church denounced the Vala as
the instrument of Satan, and from that moment down dropped the majestic
prophetess into a miserable and execrated old hag!"

"The ideas you broach," said I, musingly, "have at moments crossed me,
though I have shrunk from reducing them to a theory which is but one of
pure hypothesis. But this magic, after all, then,