If a fortune-teller gives you minute details of past facts known only to yourself, why should he not foresee the events to be produced by existing causes?  The world of ideas is cut out, so to speak, on the pattern of the physical world; the same phenomena should be discernible in both, allowing for the difference of the medium.  As, for instance, a corporeal body actually projects an image upon the atmosphere—­a spectral double detected and recorded by the daguerreotype; so also ideas, having a real and effective existence, leave an impression, as it were, upon the atmosphere of the spiritual world; they likewise produce effects, and exist spectrally (to coin a word to express phenomena for which no words exist), and certain 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