[Gutenberg 38448] • Modern Magic

Scarcely any book of the year is so profoundly interesting or fitted to hold its readers with so bewitching a spell as this latest volume of the distinguished author. It shows a complete mastery of the literature of the subject, under heads of Witchcraft, Black and White Magic, Dreams, Visions, Ghosts, Divination, Possession, Magnetism, Miraculous Cures, Mysticism. It is a perfect encyclopedia of all the more significant quasi or pseudo-miraculous events or doings known to history, especially within Christendom. They are sketched in that rapid, terse and picturesque style which enchain the reader not less than the strangely exciting matters narrated.

The question will naturally arise, why we notice such a book under the head of philosophy? The answer is simply that the author not only gives this immense body of facts which have hitherto baffled all attempts to solve them on any principle which commands general assent, but he classifies these facts under different heads, and attempts a rationale or philosophy of them. If not always satisfactory, we confess that he has contributed much to explain some of the most formidable phenomena in Demonology and Thaumatology, Without excluding from all these phenomena either the divine or diabolical supernatural, he shows that the following principles underlie and will serve to explain many of them.

1\. Abnormal powers and susceptibilities in the doers and the subjects of them which are evoked under certain conditions. Analogous preternatural states and experiences are induced by narcotic and alcoholic stimulants, fevers, contusions of the brain, great excitements of body or mind, in susceptible subjects. These awaken, in some, the power to work and communicate, in others, the power to receive or suffer experiences quite out of the regular course of nature. This unnatural susceptibility and exaltation may easily account for a large share of the phenomena of animal magnetism, pseudo-spiritualism, clairvoyance, ghosts, second sight, visions, and other forms of magic.

2\. While much in these phenomena may be thus accounted for, much more often palmed off as of this kind is due to jugglery, sleight of hand, and other forms of imposture.

3\. In some cases the two elements are largely mixed.

Prof. De Vere, however, goes beyond all this where we cannot follow him. His leanings in favor of communications from departed spirits with their friends on earth are quite pronounced. He connects this with expressions of opinion in favor of a second probation in an intermediate state for those who have lived and died in their sins. He thinks that during "this intermediate time there is nothing known to us which would absolutely forbid the idea that these living souls continue to maintain some kind of intercourse with the souls of men on earth, with whom they share all that constitutes their essential nature, save only the one fact of their bondage to the body....

-"The Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review," Vol. 2