The intellectual spirit is moving upon the chaos of minds, which ignorance and necessity have thrown into collision and confusion; and the result will be a new creation. "Nature" (to use the nervous language of an-old writer,) "will be melted down and recoined; and all will be bright and beautiful."
Alas! if this be possible now, or at any time henceforward, whence came the dross? If nature be bullion that can be melted and thus purified by the conjoint action of heat and elective attraction, I pray Mr. Noble to tell me to what name or
genus
he refers the dross? Will he tell me, to the Devil? Whence came the Devil? And how was the pure bullion so thoughtlessly made as to have an elective affinity for this Devil?
Sect. V. p. 286.
The next anecdote that I shall adduce is similar in its nature to the last * * *. The relater is Dr. Stilling, Counsellor at the Court of the Duke of Baden, in a work entitled Die Theorie der Geister-Kunde, printed in 1808.
Mr. Noble is a man of too much English good sense to have relied on Sung's (
alias
Dr. Stilling's) testimony, had he ever read the work in which this passage is found. I happen to possess the work; and a more anile, credulous, solemn fop never existed since the days of old Audley. It is strange that Mr. Noble should not have heard, that these three anecdotes were first related by Immanuel Kant, and still exist in his miscellaneous writings.