“If our powers of perception were confined only to our senses, the visible world would then encompass all our ideas, sentiments, wishes and hopes. No idea of spirits, of God and of immortality would raise us above the sphere of materiality. In order to produce and to conceive these ideas, a supersensible faculty is required. This faculty which, if closely examined, bears not the least resemblance to the rest of our intellectual powers, is called reason. The idea of the whole sensible world offers nothing to us that is not corporeal, finite, and perishable. However the territory of reason opens to us a prospect to a world without bounds, and of an everlasting duration; displays to us a kingdom of spirits which is governed by one Infinite Spirit after wise and sacred laws. An unknown world of which we had not the most distant notion, of which sensation gives us not the least hint, and for which our senses have no perception nor scale, opens to our view when our reason begins to unfold itself. You see, therefore what faculty of the soul must be our guide in our present investigation, if we wish to penetrate, by means of it, to the kingdom of spirits.”
“Reason!”
“Certainly! there is no other choice left; and therefore let us learn to value and to use this light that illuminates the darkness in which every object disappears from the eyes of mere sensitive men, or at most appears very obscure to them. That man whose reason is overdarkened, or discomposed by sensuality, either will deny the existence of spirits and our relation to them, or attribute to them the contradictory shape which his disordered imagination has hatched out, like the blind-born, who denies the existence of colours as ridiculous and absurd, or if he believes the unanimous testimony of those that see, imagines colours to bear some resemblance to sounds. Unbelief and superstition afford us numberless instances of people of that description. Only the more impartial have always maintained that one ought not to judge precipitately of these objects, and only the wisest of mankind have been able to form a just judgment of them.”
“O Hiermanfor! introduce me to the circle of the latter. I have already in the different periods of my life adhered to all the other parties. In the days of my earlier youth I believed in apparitions, like the most ignorant of the lowest class. In a more advanced period of life I fancied I was convinced of the impossibility of apparitions, and ever since I got acquainted with you, I have been wavering between unbelief and superstition. It was but lately that I resolved to postpone my judgment on these subjects, till I should be better convinced, and this conviction I expect of you.”
(To be continued.)
RUNNERS REMARKABLE FOR SWIFTNESS.
Philippides being sent on a message from the Athenians to the republic of Sparta, to gain their assistance against their enemies the Persians, ran within the compass of two days an hundred and fifty Roman miles and an half.
Under the emperor Leo, the same that succeeded Marcian, there was a Greek named Indacus, a man of extraordinary courage, and of wonderful nimbleness of foot. He was to be seen at parting, but vanished in the twinkling of an eye; he rather seemed to fly than run over mountains and dangerous precipices, and would run farther in a day than any post could ride, though he staid not a minute to change his horse, and having performed his journey, would return back the next day, though there was no occasion for making so much haste, merely because he took delight in running, and never complained of being weary.
In Peru they have Casquis, or foot posts, to carry letters or messages from place to place, who have houses about a league and an half asunder, they running each man to the next, will run fifty leagues in a day and a night.