been formed by the agency of
light.' Be this as it may, one fact remains,--that images can be seen
even by the blind as distinctly and vividly as you and I now see the
stream below our feet and the opossums at play upon yonder boughs.
Let us come next to some remarkable suggestions of Lord Bacon. In his
Natural History, treating of the force of the imagination, and the help
it receives 'by one man working by another,' he cites an instance he
had witnessed of a kind of juggler, who could tell a person what card
he thought of. He mentioned this 'to a pretended learned man, curious in
such things,' and this sage said to him, 'It is not the knowledge of the
man's thought, for that is proper to God, but the enforcing of a thought
upon him, and binding his imagination by a stronger, so that he could
think of no other card.' You see this sage anticipated our modern
electro-biologists! And the learned man then shrewdly asked Lord Bacon,
'Did the juggler tell the card to the man himself who had thought of it,
or bid another tell it?' 'He bade another tell it,' answered Lord Bacon.
'I thought so,' returned his learned acquaintance, 'for the juggler
himself could not have put on so strong an imagination; but by telling
the card to the other, who believed the juggler was some strange man who
could do strange things, that other man caught a strong imagination.'(9)
The whole story is worth reading, because Lord Bacon evidently thinks
it conveys a guess worth examining. And Lord Bacon, were he now living,
would be the man to solve the mysteries that branch out of mesmerism or
(so-called) spiritual manifestation, for he would not pretend to despise
their phenomena for fear of hurting his reputation for good sense.
Bacon then goes on to state that there are three ways to fortify the
imagination. 'First, authority derived from belief in an art and in the
man who exercises it; secondly, means to quicken and corroborate the
imagination; thirdly, means to repeat and refresh it.' For the second
and the third he refers to the practices of magic, and proceeds
afterwards to state on what things imagination has most force,--'upon
things that have the lightest and easiest motions, and, therefore, above
all, upon the spirits of men, and, in them, on such affections as
move lightest,--in love, in fear, in irresolution. And,' adds Bacon,
earnestly, in a very different spirit from that which dictates to the
sages of our time the philosophy of rejectin