Primitive Animism believes in no natural laws.  The next stage is to believe in laws which are frequently suspended by the intervention of an independent and superior power.  Mediaeval dualism regarded every breach of natural law as a vindication of the power of spirit over matter—­not always, however, of Divine power, for evil spirits could produce very similar disturbances of the physical order.  Thus arose that persistent tendency to “seek after a sign,” in which the religion of the vulgar, even in our own day, is deeply involved.  Miracle, in some form or other, is regarded as the real basis of belief in God.  At this stage people never ask themselves whether any spiritual truth, or indeed anything worth knowing, could possibly be communicated or authenticated by thaumaturgic exhibitions.  What attracts them at first is the evidence which these beliefs furnish, that the world in which they live is not entirely under the dominion of an unconscious or inflexible power, but that behind the iron mechanism of cause and effect is a will more like their own in its irregularity and arbitrariness.  Afterwards, as the majesty of law dawns upon them, miracles are no longer regarded as capricious exercises of power, but as the operation of higher physical laws, which are only active on rare occasions.  A truer view sees in them a materialisation of mystical symbols, the proper function of which is to act as interpreters between the real and the apparent, between the spiritual and material worlds.  When they crystallise as portents, they lose all their usefulness.  Moreover, the belief in celestial visitations has its dark counterpart in superstitious dread of the powers of evil, which is capable of turning life into a long nightmare, and has led to dreadful cruelties[333].  The error has still enough vitality to create a prejudice against natural science, which appears in the light of an invading enemy wresting province after province from the empire of the supernatural.

But we are concerned with thaumaturgy only so far as it has affected Mysticism.  At first sight the connexion may seem very slight; and slight indeed it is.  But just as Mysticism of the subjective type is often entangled in theories which sublimate matter till only a vain shadow remains, so objective Mysticism has been often pervaded by another kind of false spiritualism—­that which finds edification in palpable supernatural manifestations.  These so-called “mystical phenomena” are so much identified with “Mysticism” in the Roman Catholic Church of to-day, that the standard treatises on the subject, now studied in continental universities, largely consist of grotesque legends of “levitation,” “bilocation,” “incandescence,” “radiation,” and other miraculous tokens of Divine favour[334].  The great work of Goerres, in five volumes, is divided into Divine, Natural, and Diabolical Mysticism.  The first contains stories of the miraculous enhancement of sight, hearing, smell, and so forth, which results