There is a rare species of soul which withdraws itself from the body, and with zeal and labour seeks to raise itself to the knowledge of divine things. Thus the souls of men attain to natural power of divination when they are free and unclogged by the body, as is the case with inspired prophets, and sometimes even in sleep.

Thus the two following species of foreknowledge are recognised by Dicearchus, and cited by our Cratippus. Firstly, the souls of such who, despising the body, soar up into freedom, and, inflamed with a certain ardour, perceive in part those things which they have foretold. And there are various means by which such souls may be inflamed, for there are souls which may be inspired by certain tones and Phrygian music. Others are inspired by groves and woods; others by rivers and seas. I believe also that there are certain exhalations from the earth which are productive of the oracular spirit. Such is the condition of the seer; and the condition of the dreamer is very similar; for what occurs to the seer awake, occurs to us asleep. The soul is active in sleep, free of the senses and all the impediments of worldly care, the body lying as if dead. And having lived from eternity in intercourse with innumerable spirits, the soul compasses the whole of nature, and remains wakeful, if, by means of moderate indulgence in eating and drinking, it is in an undisturbed condition. Thus Plato advised people to fall asleep in such a manner that the soul should remain undisturbed. On the same account the Pythagoreans were forbidden to eat beans, as they are a flatulent food, and opposed to a calm, truth-seeking mood of mind. Then the body lies like the body of one dead, and the spirit lives, and will live yet more intensely when it shall have entirely quitted the body.

After Cicero, in the second book, has brought forward his arguments against auguries and omens, and has declared that he considers the views of the stoics-who believed in artificial soothsaying-as much too superstitious, he observes: "The views of the Peripatetics, of old Dicearchus, as well as of the now blooming Cratippus, suit me better. They believe that in the spirit of man dwells an oracle, by which the future may be perceived, either when the soul is excited

by divine inspiration, or when through sleep the soul expands herself unfettered."

The farther arguments brought forward against the Art of Divination in the course of Cicero's work, are rather directed against the then prevalent mode of interpretation than against the gift of divination and the power of the seer.

But before we proceed to a detailed history of different nations, it will not appear irrelevant to take a review of the earliest systems of philosophy, by which our attempts to explain magic may be aided.

In India and Egypt, in the earliest ages, God was imagined as the eternal spirit, origin, and ruler of the world, who, as the universal soul, penetrates, vitalises, and maintains all things; and of whom the human soul is a portion.— (Brucker, Historia philos. critica, T. i. p. 205.) The Brahmins have the same belief at the present day. Pythagoras, who studied in the Egyptian mysteries, had, according to Cicero (De natura deorum, lib. i. c. 2), a similar theory. He calls God the spirit permeating all portions of the world and all things, from whom all beings have their life. Zeno, the stoic, declared God to be the soul of the world, with which he forms a living, spherical being.

The stars were regarded as the habitations of God, and therefore declared to be divine by Pythagoras, Plato, Chalcidius, and others. Hence arose, with the spread of these views among the people, the worship of the stars under certain forms, so that many venerated the sun as the centre and noblest part of the universe, and called him the king, and the moon queen of heaven; the other celestial bodies were regarded either as their followers, or as independent divine beings-as gods.

To indicate God's existence, the ancient sages of Asia and many Greeks adopted the emblem of pure fire or ether. (Aërem amplectitur immensus æther, qui constat ex altissimis ignibus: Cic. de natura deorum, lib. ii. c. 36. Cœlum ipsum stellasque collegens, omnisque siderea compago, æther vocatur; non ut quidam putant, quod ignitus sit, et incensus, sed quod cursibus rapidis semper rotetur: Apulejus de Mundo.) Pythagoras and Empedocles entertained similar theories (Brucker, 1. c. T. i. p. 1113.) Permenides also represented God as an universal fire, which surrounded the

heavens with its circle of light and fire (Cicero de natura deor. lib. i. c. 11.) Hippasus, Heraclitus, and Hippocrates imagined God as a reasoning and immortal fire, which permeates all things (Cudworth, Systema intellectuale, p. 104; and Gesnerus de animis Hippocratis.) Plato and Aristotle departed but little from this in their teachings; and Democritus called God the reason or soul in a sphere of fire (Stobacus, Ecloga physicæ, lib. vii. c. x.) Cleonithes considered the sun as the highest God (Büsching, Grundriss einer Geschichte der Philosophie, I. Th. p. 344.) We find, therefore, in the earliest ages, an Ether theory, by which many modern theorists endeavour to explain the phenomena of magnetism.

"Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen nor can see" (Timothy, vi. 16).

"For with thee is the fountain of life; in thy light shall we see light" (Psalms, 38-9).

"Angels of light, the just, are as radiant as light; the light comes, and the glory; my right is the light of the nations; to be in light or in the living knowledge of Christ." "The Urim and Thummim. The light of wisdom, knowledge, illumination. And the earth shined with His glory."

This so-called system of emanation did not refer alone to the religious teachings and cosmology of the ancient nations of Asia and Egypt, but their whole philosophy was spiritual. Besides the Indian doctrines of the Zendavesta, in which Zoroaster's words regarding God, world, nature, and mankind, are contained, and the Oupnechat, the ancient Egyptian teachings agree with it; the Cabbalah; the Pythagoreans and Platonists, and the Alexandrians; the learned fathers of the Church, Origenes and Silesius; then the later Theosophists; the philosophi per ignem,-as Paracelsus, Adam von Boden, Jacob Gohorri; and, in the seventeenth century, Robert Fludd, Jacob Böhme, Poiret, Maxwell, Wirdig, Pordage, &c., all hold, with various modifications, this system of spiritual emanation. The Egyptians believed chaotic night a matter to be eternal with God. The new Platonists were of the opinion that nature or the world proceeded from God, as rays of light from the sun, and therefore of later origin than God-not according to time, but

nature. Others have imagined matter had always been in God, but, at a certain time, had proceeded from him and become formed.

The most ancient writing now extant upon the worldsoul, and the nature of things, is ascribed to Timæus of Locris. The principles of the Timæan doctrine are much as follows, according to Büsching:

"God shaped the eternal unformed matter by imparting to it His being. The inseparable united itself with the separable; the unvarying with the variable; and, moreover, in the harmonic conditions of the Pythagorean system. To comprehend all things better, infinite space was imagined as divided into three portions, which are, the centre, the circumference, and the intermediate space. The centre is most distant from the highest God, who inhabits the circumference; the space between the two contains the celestial spheres. When God descended to impart His being, the emanations from Him penetrated the whole of heaven, and filled the same with imperishable bodies. Its power decreased with the distance from the source, and lost itself gradually in our world in minute portions, over which matter was still dominant. From this proceeds the continuous change of being and decay below the moon, where the power of matter predominates; from this, also, arise the circular movements of the heavens and the earth, the various rapidities of the stars, and the peculiar motion of the planets. By the union of God with matter, a third being was created, namely, the world-soul, which vitalizes and regulates all things, and occupies the space between the centre and the circumference."

A further description is to be met with in Brucker and Batteux (Histoire des causes premières).

the

This Timæan doctrine was afterwards defended with more or less acuteness and subtlety by Ocellus Lucanus, upon origin of all things; Plato in his Timæus ; Aristotle in his letters, upon the system of the world, to Alexander the Great, &c.

Modern philosophers have even admitted and described this world-soul in various manners, but without imagining it to be God. Thus Descartes considered space to be filled by a fluid matter, which he believed to be elementary and to

move in circles; he also believed it to be the source and germ of all things which surround the world and impel it onwards -(a species, therefore, of magnetic fluid.) Malebranche, Father Kircher, Huyghens, Leibnitz, Bernoulli, &c., entertained similar ideas. Search describes it as a spiritual being, filling the whole material world, and permeating its minutest space; as the first principle of nature, which makes of the world an animal, dependent upon the highest being. We shall at a later period refer to Paracelsus and his suc

cessors.

Others, the so-called Dualists, considered matter as coeval with God; as in nature, matter and active power, as it were, mutually influencing each other, without being on that account either one and the same, or created at different times. Plato had a similar philosophical theory:-" There are two things, of which the one is power, the other matter; in each, however, both are contained." (De natura ita dicebant, ut eam dividerent in res duas, ut altera esset efficiens, altera autem quasi huic se præbens, eaque efficeretur aliquid. In eo quod efficeret, vim esse censebant; in eo quod efficeretur, materiam, in utroque tamen utrumque, &c. Cicero, Acad. quæst. 1. i. sect. 24.) Zeno believed in two primary causes of things, passive matter and an active reason contained in matter, or God, who always is, and produces all things from matter. He describes God as æther, or fire, or the reason which permeates all things. God is the world-soul, and forms, in conjunction with the world, a living (spherical) being. The whole world and the heavens are the substance of God. To others, the Materialists, the sole being and the cause of all phenomena, &c., is matter.

Materialism, at least in its most refined form, was current among the Egyptians. Their eternal matter, night, was to them æther-the material God. Orpheus, Musæus, and Hesiod, have, in their descriptions of natural objects, called matter night or chaos, and traced the origin of all things to its activity (Gesner's edition of the Works of Orpheus, p. 118.)

Canam noctem, deorum pariter atque hominem genetricem; nox origo rerum omnium."

The opinions of philosophers concerning matter were, however, very various. Some denied to it all properties,