But again. These ecstasies, cures, and so forth, brought them rapidly
back to the old priestcrafts. The Egyptian priests, the Babylonian and
Jewish sorcerers, had practised all this as a trade for ages, and
reduced it to an art. It was by sleeping in the temples of the deities,
after due mesmeric manipulations, that cures were even then effected.
Surely the old priests were the people to whom to go for information.
The old philosophers of Greece were venerable. How much more those of
the East, in comparison with whom the Greeks were children? Besides, if
these daemons and deities were so near them, might it not be possible to
behold them? They seemed to have given up caring much for the world and
its course -


Effugerant adytis templisque relictis
Di quibus imperium steterat.


The old priests used to make them appear--perhaps they might do it
again. And if spirit could act directly and preternaturally on matter,
in spite of the laws of matter, perhaps matter might act on spirit.
After all, were matter and spirit so absolutely different? Was not
spirit some sort of pervading essence, some subtle ethereal fluid,
differing from matter principally in being less gross and dense? This
was the point to which they went down rapidly enough; the point to which
all philosophies, I firmly believe, will descend, which do not keep in
sight that the spiritual means the moral. In trying to make it mean
exclusively the intellectual, they will degrade it to mean the merely
logical and abstract; and when that is found to be a barren and lifeless
phantom, a mere projection of the human brain, attributing reality to
mere conceptions and names, and confusing the subject with the object,