fear, operate no other effect than the same would do if they had passed
through my mind as thoughts, while I was composing a faery tale; the
whole depending on the wise and gracious law in our nature, that the
actual bodily sensations, called forth according to the law of
association by thoughts and images of the mind, never greatly transcend
the limits of pleasurable feeling in a tolerably healthy frame, unless
where an act of the judgment supervenes and interprets them as
purporting instant danger to ourselves.

[1] There have been very strange and incredible stories told of and by
the alchemists. Perhaps in some of them there may have been a specific
form of mania, originating in the constant intension of the mind on an
imaginary end, associated with an immense variety of means, all of them
substances not familiar to men in general, and in forms strange and
unlike to those of ordinary nature. Sometimes, it seems as if the
alchemists wrote like the Pythagoreans on music, imagining a
metaphysical and inaudible music as the basis of the audible. It is
clear that by sulphur they meant the solar rays or light, and by mercury
the principle of ponderability, so that their theory was the same with
that of the Heraclitic physics, or the modern German 'Naturphilosophie',
which deduces all things from light and gravitation, each being bipolar;
gravitation=north and south, or attraction and repulsion; light=east and
west, or contraction and dilation; and gold being the tetrad, or
interpenetration of both, as water was the dyad of light, and iron the
dyad of gravitation.

It is, probably, unjust to accuse the alchemists generally of dabbling
with attempts at magic in the common sense of the term. The supposed
exercise of magical power always involved some moral guilt, directly or
indirectly, as in stealing a piece of meat to lay on warts, touching