desire of recovery is a search after life, and this, as Emerson says of power, is an element with which the world is so saturated there being no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged that no honest seeking need go unrewarded. All matter is animated and acted upon by invisible agencies, of which heat and light are the most apparent. But these are only expressions on the plane of sense of the invisible and imponderable life-principle.

Speaking of the flakes or scales, like willow leaves, seen in the photosphere of the sun, Sir John Herschel came near to the truth in the following daring and sublime speculation : "And these flakes, be they what they may, and whatever may be said about the dashing of meteoric stones with the sun's atmosphere, &c., are evidently the immediate sources of the solar light and heat, by whatever mechanism or whatever processes they may be enabled to develop, and, as it were, elaborate these elements from the bosom of the non-luminous fluid in which they appear to float. Looked at in this point of view, we cannot refuse to regard them as organisms of some peculiar and amazing kind; and though it would be too daring to speak of such organization as partaking of the nature of life, yet we do know that vital action is competent to develop both heat, light, and electricity." ("Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects," pp. 83, 84).

In his "Coming Race," a work which contains many hints respecting the Oriental occult science, Lord Lytton denominates the universal life-principle and primal force, which the Hindu adepts call the akasa, by the unusual name of vril, and says that in vril his underground people thought that "they had arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies." Like the akasa of the Hindu transcendental science, it is a sort of "atmospheric magnetism," and controllable by the imagination and will of man. It is the "occult air" of the Kabalists, and is called by the Jewish prophets "the breath of God" and "the breath of life." Its nature, hidden properties, the laws

of its action, and how to control it, were undoubtedly a part of the esoteric teaching in the prophetic schools. It is clearly mentioned in the celebrated vision of the dry bones in Ezekiel, "Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, and they shall live." (Ezek. xxxvii. 9.) Is it true that this subtle and universal element of life will come at our call, and can we give it quality and modify its action? If so, it is the most important thing that medical philosophy can teach. Of the occult philosopher Haroun of Aleppo, Lord Lytton says: "He had discovered the great principle of animal life, which had hitherto baffled the subtlest anatomist, and, provided only that the great organs were not irreparably destroyed, there was no disease that he could not cure, no decrepitude to which he could not restore vigour; yet his science was based on the same theory as that espoused by the best professional practitioners of medicine, viz., that the true art of healing is to assist nature to throw off the disease,― to summon, as it were, the whole system to eject the enemy that had fastened on a part. And thus his processes, though occasionally varying in the means employed, all combined in this, viz., the reinvigorating and recruiting of the principle of life." ("A Strange Story," p. 186.)

"The universal substance," says Eliphas Levi, "with its double motion (its active and reactive properties), is the great arcanum of being." This is profoundly true. This pre-existent and invisible essence of things which we call life, this elemental and universal substance, is often latent in nature, and is without form or quality in itself, but receives quality from our imagination or thought, just as water takes form from the glass vessel that contains it. We see illustrations of this in the life of men. If a person swallows a few drops of water, or a pill made of bread crumbs, thinking it a cathartic medicine, it will give to it that quality, and it will quicken the peristaltic movement of the intestinal canal. Thought has power to alter the nature of things so as to radically change

their quality. This is implied in the promise of Jesus, that, if we believe, or have faith, to drink any deadly thing will not harm us. Thus Paul overcame the otherwise fatal bite and poison of the viper. Jesus also says, "Be it unto thee according to thy faith;" but faith is only a mode of thought. The passive life-principle of the human body and of all things is as sensitive to the influence of thought and imagination as the film in the camera of the photographic artist is to shades of light. This universal life-principle and primordial substance has an affinity for our inward character, as some one has said, and is en rapport with the purposes which we wish to effect by it,—as the relief of pain and the cure of disease. Our minds and wills can give quality to it; and by the projectile power of the mind, and by a thought-impulse, a current or tendency of it can be determined upon the body of another, to recruit and augment his vital energy. By certain movements of the hands, which are but the expression of our thoughts, we can cause it to accumulate in the brain, and the whole physical organism or any part of it, and its invigorating effects will sometimes border on the marvellous. The reinforcing the vital power of the whole system is the shortest and most direct way of curing any diseased part. The air and the water contain all the invisible essences of things, that from which all plants and minerals arise, and of which they are, so to speak, only condensations, or precipitations, so that they become manifest to our crude senses. We see granite rock floating in the air in the form of dust. But there is an invisible, imponderable dust, or primal stuff, or substance,—the mysterious clay of the first chapter of Genesis,-out of which dust the body of man was and is formed, and to which it returns. These spiritual virtues and living principles of things are controllable by the will, faith, and imagination of man, and can, with any quality our thought may give them, be determined upon the body or any of its organs. They can also be infused into any inert substances, as milk-sugar, or water, or

even paper, and they become invested with the peculiar properties of any herb or drug. But all this lies within the unexplored domain of the occult science of medicine. In an old work by a Scotch physician by the name of Maxwell, entitled "Medicina Magnetica," and published at Frankfort in 1679, it is said: "That-which men call the world spirit (the weltgeist of the German, the anima mundi of the Platonic philosophy) is a life, as spiritual, fleet, subtle, and ethereal as light itself. It is a life-spirit everywhere, and everywhere the same; and this is the common bond of all quarters of the earth, and lives through and in all,

"If thou canst avail thyself of this spirit and accumulate it in particular bodies, thou wilt receive no trifling benefit from it, for therein consists all the mystery of magic (or magnetism). This spirit is found in nature free from all fetters; and he who understands how to unite it to a harmonizing body possesses a treasure which exceeds all riches."

"He who knows how to operate on men by this spirit can heal, and this at any distance he pleases." (Ennemoser's "History of Magic," vol. ii. p. 258.) This brief extract contains the key to the mystery of healing by magnetism, and by mental forces and agencies. The true magnetic healer has learned the nature and properties of the universal divine life-principle, and how to influence its action. It is an exalted science in its higher applications, and will be rescued from its present degradation, and restored to its ancient dignity as the science of sciences. It was once called magic, a word which signifies wisdom, for it was a true spiritual philosophy, founded upon immutable and eternal principles, and was practised by many of the noblest and divinest men the world ever saw.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE UNIVERSAL ETHER OF SCIENCE, AND THE ÆTHER OF THE HERMETIC PHILOSOPHY.

MAGNETISM, as the universal life-principle, and that by which God is present and acts in nature, is in a perpetual effort to ultimate or actualize the divine idea of things in material forms. This effort we believe can be aided, and its operation greatly accelerated, by the intelligent will and imagination of man. When I think that a patient is well-and this is true, as has been shown before, of his immortal self or spiritual entity, the thought by an occult law takes form in an idea, in the Logos or Divine Truth, as Swedenborg would call it, which is a spiritual and living substance. But this idea will take a more external shape in the universal soul-life of nature, the primal substance or cosmic matter. It then becomes a real creation, an ideal entity, a thing of the unseen world. But the soul of the patient is a part of the soul of the world and not disconnected from it; and on his soul the ideal picture may be photographed, and it will still tend outward by a force proportioned to the intensity of the original thought and vividness of the idea, until it translates itself into a full bodily expression, or creates the physical organism into its own image. "An idea," says Plutarch, "is a being (or thing) incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation." ("De Placitio Philosophorum.") The cosmic matter, the primal stuff of which all things are made (and which is recognized in science