There are still
at Brussels eye-witnesses of this occurrence," says Van Helmont;
and adds, "I pray what is there in this of superstition or of
exalted imagination?"
Modern mind-cure literature--the works of Prentice Mulford, for
example--is full of sympathetic magic.
How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, for
explanation and prevision, of those mathematical and mechanical
modes of conception which science uses, was a result that could
not possibly have been expected in advance. Weight, movement,
velocity, direction, position, what thin, pallid, uninteresting
ideas! How could the richer animistic aspects of Nature, the
peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena picturesquely
striking or expressive, fail to have been first singled out and
followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the
knowledge of Nature's life? Well, it is still in these richer
animistic and dramatic aspects that religion delights to dwell.
It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the "promise" of the
dawn and of the rainbow, the "voice" of the thunder, the
"gentleness" of the summer rain, the "sublimity" of the stars,
and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the
religious mind still continues to be most impressed; and just as
of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his
room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that
inflowings of help come in reply to his prayers, and that
sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and
peace.
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