So many proven facts have been first discovered by occult science,
that some day we shall have professors of occult science, as we
already have professors of chemistry and astronomy. It is even
singular that here in Paris, where we are founding chairs of Mantchu
and Slave and literatures so little professable (to coin a word) as
the literatures of the North (which, so far from providing lessons,
stand very badly in need of them); when the curriculum is full of the
everlasting lectures on Shakespeare and the sixteenth century,--it is
strange that some one has not restored the teaching of the occult
philosophies, once the glory of the University of Paris, under the
title of anthropology. Germany, so childlike and so great, has
outstripped France in this particular; in Germany they have professors
of a science of far more use than a knowledge of the heterogeneous
philosophies, which all come to the same thing at bottom.
Once admit that certain beings have the power of discerning the future
in its germ-form of the Cause, as the great inventor sees a glimpse of
the industry latent in his invention, or a science in something that
happens every day unnoticed by ordinary eyes--once allow this, and
there is nothing to cause an outcry in such phenomena, no violent
exception to nature's laws, but the operation of a recognized faculty;
possibly a kind of mental somnambulism, as it were. If, therefore, the
hypothesis upon which the various ways of divining the future are
based seem absurd, the facts remain.
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