Again, I believe that all that use sorceries, incantations, and spells are not witches, or, as we term them, magicians.  I conceive there is a traditional magic not learned immediately from the Devil, but at second hand from his scholars, who, having once the secret betrayed, are able, and do empirically practice without his advice, they both proceeding upon the principles of nature; where actives aptly conjoined to disposed passives will under any master produce their effects.  Thus, I think at first a great part of philosophy was witchcraft, which being afterward derived to one another, proved but philosophy, and was indeed no more but the honest effects of nature:  what invented by us is philosophy, learned from him is magic.  We do surely owe the discovery of many secrets to the discovery of good and bad angels.  I could never pass that sentence of Paracelsus without an asterisk or annotation:  “Ascendens astrum multa revelat quaerentibus magnalia naturae, i.e., opera Dei.”  I do think that many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the courteous revelations of spirits,—­for those noble essences in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow natures on earth; and therefore believe that those many prodigies and ominous prognostics which forerun the ruins of States, princes, and private persons are the charitable premonitions of good angels, which more careless inquiries term but the effects of chance and nature.

Now, besides these particular and divided spirits there may be (for aught I know) an universal and common spirit to the whole world.  It was the opinion of Plato, and it is yet of the Hermetical philosophers:  if there be a common nature that unites and ties the scattered and divided individuals into one species, why may there not be one that unites them all?  However, I am sure there is a common spirit that plays within us, yet makes no part of us:  and that is the Spirit of God, the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty essence which is the life and radical heat of spirits and those essences that know not the virtue of the sun; a fire quite contrary to the fire of hell:  this is that gentle heat that brooded on the waters, and in six days hatched the world; this is that irradiation that dispels the mists of hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity:  whosoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwelt in the body of the sun.