I believe
the knowledge of them at one time existed, but has been entirely
lost, at any rate among Western peoples. The belief in magic is as
old as anything we have knowledge of. The magicians at the court
of Pharaoh threw down their rods and turned them into serpents.
The Witch of Endor called up the spirit of Samuel. The Greeks, by
no means a nation of fools, believed implicitly in the Oracles.
Coming down to comparatively later times, the workers of magic
burnt their books before St. Paul. It doesn't say, mind you, that
those who pretended to work magic did so; but those who worked
magic.
"Early travelers in Persia and India have reported things they saw
far surpassing any we have witnessed this evening, and there is
certainly a sect in India at present, or rather a body of men, and
those, as far as I have been able to learn, of an exceptionally
intelligent class, who believe that they possess an almost absolute
mastery over the powers of nature. You see, fifty years back,
if anyone had talked about traveling at fifty miles an hour, or
sending a message five thousand miles in a minute, he would have
been regarded as a madman. There may yet be other discoveries as
startling to be made.
"When I was in England I heard something of a set of people in
America who called themselves Spiritualists, some of whom--notably
a young man named Home--claimed to have the power of raising
themselves through the air. I am far from saying that such a power
exists; it is of course contrary to what we know of the laws
of nature, but should such a power exist it would account for
the disappearance of the girl from the top of the pole.
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