mployed by Iamblicus, Abamnon, and those who clung
lovingly to the old priestly rites of Egypt and Chaldaea. They had
seemed to her vulgar toys, tricks of legerdemain, suited only for the
wonder of the mob.... She began to think of them with more favour now.
How did she know that the vulgar did not require signs and wonders to
make them believe?.... How, indeed? for did she not want such herself?
And she opened Abamnon's famous letter to Porphyry, and read earnestly
over, for the twentieth time, his subtle justification of magic, and
felt it to be unanswerable. Magic? What was not magical? The whole
universe, from the planets over her head to the meanest pebble at her
feet, was utterly mysterious, ineffable, miraculous, influencing and
influenced by affinities and repulsions as unexpected, as unfathomable,
as those which, as Abamnon said, drew the gods towards those sounds,
those objects, which, either in form, or colour, or chemical properties,
were symbolic of, or akin to, themselves. What wonder in it, after
all? Was not love and hatred, sympathy and antipathy, the law of the
universe? Philosophers, when they gave mechanical explanations of
natural phenomena, came no nearer to the real solution of them. The
mysterious 'Why?' remained untouched.... All their analyses could only
darken with big words the plain fact that the water hated the oil
with which it refused to mix, the lime loved the acid which it eagerly
received into itself, and, like a lover, grew warm with the rapture of
affection. Why not? What right had we to deny sensation, emotion, to
them, any more than to ourselves? Was not the same universal spirit
stirring in them as in us? And was it not by virtue of that spirit that
we thought, and felt, and loved?--Then why not they, as well as we?
If the one spirit permeated all things, if its all-energising presence
linked the flower with the crystal as well as with the demon and the
god, must it not link together also the two extremes of the great chain
of being? bind even the nameless One itself to the smallest creature
which bore its creative impress? What greater miracle in the attraction
of a god or an angel, by material incense, symbols, and spells, than
in the attraction of one soul to another by the material sounds of the
human voice? Was the affinity between spirit and matter implied in that,
more miraculous than the affinity between the soul and the body?--than
the retention of that soul within that bod