rtain human
beings are endowed with the faculty of discerning these "forms" or
traces of ideas.

As for the material means employed to assist the seer--the objects
arranged by the hands of the consultant that the accidents of his life
may be revealed to him,--this is the least inexplicable part of the
process. Everything in the material world is part of a series of
causes and effects. Nothing happens without a cause, every cause is a
part of a whole, and consequently the whole leaves its impression on
the slightest accident. Rabelais, the greatest mind among moderns,
resuming Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Aristophanes, and Dante, pronounced
three centuries ago that "man is a microcosm"--a little world. Three
hundred years later, the great seer Swedenborg declared that "the
world was a man." The prophet and the precursor of incredulity meet
thus in the greatest of all formulas.

Everything in human life is predestined, so it is also with the
existence of the planet. The least event, the most futile phenomena,
are all subordinate parts of a scheme. Great things, therefore, great
designs, and great thoughts are of necessity reflected in the smallest
actions, and that so faithfully, that should a conspirator shuffle and
cut a pack of playing-cards, he will write the history of his plot for
the eyes of the seer styled gypsy, fortune-teller, charlatan, or what
not. If you once admit fate, which is to say, the chain of links of
cause and effect, astrology has a _locus standi_, and becomes what it
was of yore, a boundless science, requiring the same faculty of
deduction by which Cuvier became so great, a faculty to be exercised
spontaneously, however, and not merely in nights of study in the
closet.

For seven centuries astrology and divination have exercised an
influence not only (as at present) over the uneducated, but over the
greatest minds, over kings and queens and wealthy people. Animal
magnetism, one of the great sciences of antiquity, had its origin in
occult philosophy; chemistry is the outcome of alchemy; phrenology and
neurology are no less the fruit of similar studies. The first
illustrious workers in these, to all appearance, untouched fields,
made one mistake, the mistake of all inventors; that is to say, they
erected an absolute system on a basis of isolated facts for which
modern analysis as yet cannot account. The Catholic Church, the law of
the land, and modern philosophy, in agreement for once, combined to
p