Of course I speak only of the facts of these arts, I do not speak of the theories put forward.

All these processes are in the very outermost court of the Temple of True Magic, even if they are not outside the precinct.  But they are sufficient for our purpose, and should make the serious thinker and unprejudiced enquirer pause before pronouncing the words, superstition and hallucination, in too confident a tone, for he now must see the necessity of having a clear idea of what he means by the terms.

It is not uncommon of late to hear the superficially instructed setting down everything to “suggestion,” a word they have picked up from modern hypnotic research, or “telepathy,” a name invented by psychical research—­the ideas being as old as the world—­forgetting that their mind remains in precisely the same attitude with regard to such matters as it was in previously when they utterly denied the possibility of suggestion and telepathy.  But to the earnest and patient student hypnotism and the rest are but the public reaeppearance of what has always existed in spite of the denial of two hundred years or so, and instead of covering the whole ground is but the forward spray from the returning wave of psychism which will sweep the nations off their feet and moral balance, if they will not turn to the experience of the past and gain strength to withstand the inrush.

The higher forms of all these things, in the Western World, should have now been in the hands of the ministers of the Church, in which case we should not have had the reaeppearance of such powers in the hands of vulgar stage exhibitions and mercenary public mediumship.

But so it is; and in vain is it any longer to raise the cry of fraud and hallucination on the one hand and of the devil on the other.  This is a mere shirking of responsibility, and nothing but a reasonable investigation and an insistence on the highest ideals of life will help humanity.

I do not intend to enter into any review of the “wonders” attributed to Simon, neither to deny them as hallucinations, nor attribute them to the devil, nor explain them away by “suggestion.”  As a matter of fact we do not even know whether Simon did or pretended to do any of the precise things mentioned.  All we are competent to decide is the general question, viz., that any use of abnormal power is pernicious if done for a personal motive, and will assuredly, sooner or later, react on the doer.

Here and there in the patristic accounts we light on a fact worthy of consideration, as, for example, when Simon is reported to have denied that the real soul of a boy could be exorcised, and said that it was only a daemon, in this case a sub-human intelligence or elemental, as the Mediaeval Kabalists called them.  Again the Simonians are said to have expelled any from their Mysteries who worshipped the statues of Zeus or Athena as being representatives of Simon and Helen; thus showing that they were symbolical figures for some purpose other than ordinary worship; and probably the sect in its purity possessed a body of teaching which threw light on many of the religious practices of the times, and gave them a rational interpretation, quite at variance with the fantastic diabolism which the Fathers have so loudly charged against them.