y analyzed, and only, indeed, potential over exceptional
temperaments, which may account for the fact that iron and crystal have
been favourites with all professed mystics, ancient and modern. The
Delphic Pythoness had her iron tripod, Mesmer his iron bed; and many
persons, indisputably honest, cannot gaze long upon a ball of crystal
but what they begin to see visions. I suspect that a philosophical cause
for such seemingly preternatural effects of crystal and iron will be
found in connection with the extreme impressionability to changes in
temperatures which is the characteristic both of crystal and iron.
But if these materials do contain certain powers over exceptional
constitutions, we do not arrive at a supernatural but at a natural
phenomenon."

"Still," said I, "even granting that your explanatory hypotheses hit
or approach the truth;--still what a terrible power you would assign to
man's will over men's reason and deeds!"

"Man's will," answered Faber, "has over men's deeds and reason, habitual
and daily, power infinitely greater and, when uncounterbalanced,
infinitely more dangerous than that which superstition exaggerates in
magic. Man's will moves a war that decimates a race, and leaves behind
it calamities little less dire than slaughter. Man's will frames, but it
also corrupts laws; exalts, but also demoralizes opinion; sets the world
mad with fanaticism, as often as it curbs the heart's fierce instincts
by the wisdom of brother-like mercy. You revolt at the exceptional,
limited sway over some two or three individuals which the arts of a
sorcerer (if sorcerer there be) can effect; and yet, at the very moment
in which you were perplexed and appalled by such sway, or by your
reluctant belief in it, your will was devising an engine to unsettle the
reason and wither the hopes of millions!"

"My will! What engine?"

"A book conceived by your intellect, adorned by your learning, and
directed by your will, to steal from the minds of other men their
persuasion of the soul's everlasting Hereafter."

I bowed my head, and felt myself grow pale.

"And if we accept Bacon's theory of 'secret sympathy,' or the plainer
physiological maxim that there must be in the imagination, morbidly
impressed by the will of another, some trains of idea in affinity with
such influence and preinclined to receive it, no magician could warp you
to evil, except through thoughts that themselves went astray. Grant
that the Margrave who s