te of an egg,
which, exposed to a gentle heat, and mixed with a bait of flesh, you
shall give to a hungry dog or hog, the disease shall instantly pass
from you into the animal, and leave you entirely. And similarly again,
if you burn some of the milk either of a cow or of a woman, the gland
from which it issued will dry up. A gentleman at Brussels had his nose
mowed off in a combat, but the celebrated surgeon Tagliacozzus digged a
new nose for him out of the skin of the arm of a porter at Bologna.
About thirteen months after his return to his own country, the
engrafted nose grew cold, putrefied, and in a few days dropped off, and
it was then discovered that the porter had expired, near about the same
punctilio of time. There are still at Brussels eye-witnesses of this
occurrence," says Van Helmont; and adds, "I pray what is there in this
of superstition or of exalted imagination?"

Modern mind-cure literature--the works of Prentice Mulford, for
example--is full of sympathetic magic.

How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, for
explanation and prevision, of those mathematical and mechanical modes
of conception which science uses, was a result that could not possibly
have been expected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction,
position, what thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the richer
animistic aspects of Nature, the peculiarities and oddities that make
phenomena picturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first
singled out and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to
the knowledge of Nature's life? Well, it is still in these richer
animistic and dramatic aspects that religion delights to dwell. It is
the terror and beauty of phenomena, the "promise" of the dawn and of
the rainbow, the "voice" of the thunder, the "gentleness" of the summer
rain, the "sublimity" of the stars, and not the physical laws which
these things follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be
most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in
the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels the divine
presence, that inflowings of help come in reply to his prayers, and
that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace.

Pure anachronism! says the survival-theory;--anachronism for which
deanthropomorphization of the imagination is the remedy required. The
less we mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell