ZOROASTER AND THE MAGI.
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sion of an internal causal world as absolutely real: it is said, in intellectually admitting, because the influence of the arts proves that men’s feelings always have admitted, and do still admit, this reality.” The Platonic philosophy of vision is, that it is the view of objects really existing in interior light, which assume form, not according to arbitrary laws, but according to the state of mind. This interior light, if we understand Plato, unites with exterior light in the eye, and is thus drawn into a sensual or imaginative activity; but when the outward light is separated, it reposes in its own serene atmosphere. It is, then, in this state of interior repose, that the usual class of religious, or what are called inspired, visions occur. It is the same light of eternity so frequently alluded to in books that treat of mysterious subjects; the light revealed to Pimander, Zoroaster, and all the sages of the East, as the emanation of the spiritual sun. Bohmen writes of it in his Divine Vision or Contemplation, and Molinos in his Spiritual Guide,—whose work is the ground of Quietism: Quietism being the foundation of the religion of the people called Friends or Quakers, as also of the other mystic or meditative sects. We enlarge from a very learned, candid, and instructive book upon the Occult Sciences. Regard Fire, then, with other eyes than with those soulless, incurious ones, with which thou hast looked upon it as the most ordinary thing. Thou hast forgotten what it is— or rather thou hast never known. Chemists are silent about it; or, may we not say that it is too loud for them? Therefore shall they speak fearfully of it in whispers. Philosophers talk of it as anatomists discourse of the constituents (or the parts) of the human body—as a piece of mechanism, wondrous though it be. Such the wheels of the clock, say they in their ingenious expounding of the “whys” and the “wherefores” (and the mechanics and the mathematics) of this mysterious thing, with a supernatural soul in it, called world. Such is the chain, such are the balances, such the larger and the smaller mechanical forces; such the “Time-blood,” as it were, that is sent circulating