DREAMS AT THE DAWN OF PHILOSOPHY.

MODERN philosophy, theoretical or experimental, only amuses while the action of discovery is suspended or advances; the interest ceases with the inquirer when the catastrophe is ascertained, as in the romance whose dénouement turns on a mysterious incident, which, once unfolded, all future agitation ceases. But in the true infancy of science, philosophers were as imaginative a race as poets: marvels and portents, undemonstrable and undefinable, with occult fancies, perpetually beginning and never ending, were delightful as the shifting cantos of Ariosto. Then science entranced the eye by its thaumaturgy; when they looked through an optic tube, they believed they were looking into futurity; or, starting at some shadow darkening the glassy globe, beheld the absent person; while the mechanical inventions of art were toys and tricks, with sometimes an automaton, which frightened them with life.

The earlier votaries of modern philosophy only witnessed, as Gaffarel calls his collection, "Unheard-of Curiosities." This state of the marvellous, of which we are now for ever deprived, prevailed among the philosophers and the virtuosi in Europe, and with ourselves, long after the establishment of the Royal Society. Philosophy then depended mainly on authority-a single one, however, was sufficient: so that when this had been repeated by fifty others, they had the authority of fifty honest men-whoever the first man might have been ! They were then a blissful race of children, rambling here and there in a golden age of innocence and ignorance, where at every step each gifted discoverer whispered to the few, some half-concealed secret of nature, or played with some toy of art; some invention which with great difficulty performed what, without it, might have been done with great ease. The cabinets of the lovers of mechanical arts formed enchanted apartments, where the admirers feared to stir or look about them; while the philosophers themselves half imagined they were the very thaumaturgi, for which the world gave them too much credit, at least for their quiet! Would we run after the shadows in this gleaming land of moonshine, or sport with these children in the fresh morning of science, ere Aurora had scarcely peeped on the hills, we must enter into their feelings, view with their eyes, and

believe all they confide to us; and out of these bundles of dreams sometimes pick out one or two for our own dreaming. They are the fairy tales and the Arabian Nights' entertainments of science. But if the reader is stubbornly mathematical and logical, he will only be holding up a great torch. against the muslin curtain, upon which the fantastic shadows playing upon it must vanish at the instant. It is an amusement which can only take place by carefully keeping himself in the dark.*

What a subject, were I to enter on it, would be the narratives of magical writers! These precious volumes have been so constantly wasted by the profane, that now a book of real magic requires some to find it, as well as a great magician to use it. Albertus Magnus, or Albert the Great, as he is erroneously styled-for this sage only derived this enviable epithet from his surname De Groot, as did Hugo Grotius-this sage, in his "Admirable Secrets," delivers his opinion that these books of magic should be most preciously preserved; for, he prophetically added, the time is arriving when they would be understood! It seems they were not intelligible in the thirteenth century; but if Albertus has not miscalculated, in the present day they may be! Magical terms with talismanic figures may yet conceal many a secret; gunpowder came down to us in a sort of anagram, and the kaleidoscope, with all its interminable multiplications of forms, lay at hand for twocenturies in Baptista Porta's "Natural Magic." The abbot Trithemius, in a confidential letter, happened to call himself a magician, perhaps at the moment he thought himself one, and sent three or four leaves stuffed with the names of devils and with their evocations. At the death of his friend these leaves fell into the unworthy hands of the prior, who was so frightened on the first glance at the diabolical nomenclature, that he raised the country against the abbot, and Trithemius. was nearly a lost man! Yet, after all, this evocation of devils has reached us in his "Steganographia," and proves to be only one of this ingenious abbot's polygraphic attempts at secret writing; for he had flattered himself that he had invented a mode of concealing his thoughts from all the world, while he communicated them to a friend. Roger Bacon promised to raise thunder and lightning, and disperse clouds by dissolving them into rain. The first magical process has been

* Godwin's amusing Lives of the Necromancers abound in marvellous stories of the supernatural feats of these old students.

obtained by Franklin; and the other, of far more use to our agriculturists, may perchance be found lurking in some corner which has been overlooked in the " 'Opus majus" of our "Doctor mirabilis." Do we laugh at their magical works of art? Are we ourselves such indifferent artists ? Cornelius Agrippa, before he wrote his "Vanity of the Arts and Sciences," intended to reduce into a system and method the secret of communicating with spirits and demons.* On good authority, that of Porphyrius, Psellus, Plotinus, Jamblichus-and on better, were it necessary to allege it-he was well assured that the upper regions of the air swarmed with what the Greeks called dæmones, just as our lower atmosphere is full of birds, our waters of fish, and our earth of insects. Yet this occult philosopher, who knew perfectly eight languages, and married two wives, with whom he had never exchanged a harsh word in any of them, was everywhere avoided as having by his side, for his companion, a personage no less than a demon! This was a great black dog, whom he suffered to stretch himself out among his magical manuscripts, or lie on his bed, often kissing and patting him, and feeding him on choice morsels. Yet for this would Paulus Jovius and all the world have had him put to the ordeal of fire and fagot! The truth was afterwards boldly asserted by Wierus, his learned domestic, who believed that his master's dog was really nothing more than what he appeared! I believe," says he, "that he was a real natural dog; he was indeed black, but of a moderate size, and I have often led him by a string, and called him by the French name Agrippa had given him, Monsieur! and he had a female who was called Mademoiselle! I wonder how authors of such great character should write so absurdly on his vanishing at his death, nobody knows how!" But as it is probable that Monsieur and Mademoiselle must have generated some puppy demons, Wierus ought to have been more circumstantial.

Albertus Magnus, for thirty years, had never ceased working at a man of brass, and had cast together the qualities of his materials under certain constellations, which threw such

* Agrippa was the most fortunate and honoured of occult philosophers. He was lodged at courts, and favoured by all his contemporaries. Scholars like Erasmus spoke of him with admiration; and royalty constantly sought his powers of divination. But in advanced life he was accused of sorcery, and died poor in 1534.

a spirit into his man of brass, that it was reported his growth was visible; his feet, legs, thighs, shoulders, neck, and head, expanded, and made the city of Cologne uneasy at possessing one citizen too mighty for them all. This man of brass, when he reached his maturity, was so loquacious, that Albert's master, the great scholastic Thomas Aquinas, one day, tired of his babble, and declaring it was a devil, or devilish, with his staff knocked the head off; and, what was extraordinary, this brazen man, like any human being thus effectually silenced, "word never spake more." This incident is equally historical and authentic; though whether heads of brass can speak, and even prophesy, was indeed a subject of profound inquiry even at a later period.* Naudé, who never questioned their vocal powers, and yet was puzzled concerning the nature of this new species of animal, has no doubt most judiciously stated the question, Whether these speaking brazen heads had a sensitive and reasoning nature, or whether demons spoke in them? But brass has not the faculty of providing its own nourishment, as we see in plants, and therefore they were not sensitive; and as for the act of reasoning, these brazen heads presumed to know nothing but the future: with the past and the present they seemed totally unacquainted, so that their memory and their observation were very limited; and as for the future, that is always doubtful and obscure even to heads of brass! This learned man then infers that "These brazen heads could have no reasoning faculties, for nothing altered their nature; they said what they had to say, which no one could contradict; and having said their say, you might have broken the head for anything more that you could have got out of it. Had they had any life in them, would they not have moved as well as spoken? Life itself is but motion, but they had no lungs, no spleen; and, in fact, though they spoke, they had no tongue. Was a devil in them? I think not. Yet why should men have taken all this trouble to make, not a man, but a trumpet ?"

Our profound philosopher was right not to agitate the question whether these brazen heads had ever spoken. Why

* One of the most popular of our old English prose romances, "The Historie of Fryer Bacon," narrates how he had intended to "wall England about with brass," by means of such a brazen head, had not the stupidity of a servant prevented him. The tale may be read in Thoms' "Collection of Early English Prose Romances."

should not a man of brass speak, since a doll can whisper, a statue play chess,* and brass ducks have performed the whole process of digestion ?+ Another magical invention has been ridiculed with equal reason. A magician was annoyed, as philosophers still are, by passengers in the street; and he, particularly so, by having horses led to drink under his window. He made a magical horse of wood, according to one of the books of Hermes, which perfectly answered its purpose, by frightening away the horses, or rather the grooms! the wooden horse, no doubt, gave some palpable kick. The same magical story might have been told of Dr. Franklin, who finding that under his window the passengers had discovered a spot which they made too convenient for themselves, he charged it with his newly-discovered electrical fire. After a few remarkable incidents had occurred, which at a former period would have lodged the great discoverer of electricity in the Inquisition, the modern magician succeeded just as well as the ancient, who had the advantage of conning over the books of Hermes. Instead of ridiculing these works of magic, let us rather become magicians ourselves!

The works of the ancient alchemists have afforded numberless discoveries to modern chemists: nor is even their grand operation despaired of. If they have of late not been so renowned, this has arisen from a want of what Ashmole calls apertness;" a qualification early inculcated among these illuminated sages. We find authentic accounts of some who have lived three centuries, with tolerable complexions, possessed of nothing but a crucible and a bellows! but they were so unnecessarily mysterious, that whenever such a person

*The allusion here is to the automaton chess-player, first exhibited by Kempelen (its inventor) in England about 1785. The figure was habited as a Turk, and placed behind a chest, this was opened by the exhibitor to display the machinery, which seemed to give the figure motion, while playing intricate games of chess with any of the spectators. But it has been fully demonstrated that this chest could conceal a full-grown man, who could place his arm down that of the figure, and direct its movements in the game; the machinery being really constructed to hide him, and disarm suspicion. As the whole trick has been demonstrated by diagrams, the marvellous nature of the machinery is exploded.

+ This brass duck was the work of a very ingenious mechanist, M. Vaucanson; it is reported to have uttered its natural voice, moved its wings, drank water, and ate corn. In 1738, he delighted the Parisians by a figure of a shepherd which played on a pipe and beat a tabor; and a fluteplayer who performed twelve tunes.