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