Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/318

 times and among all peoples. Sympathetic remedies, too, belong to this kind of magic. They are a contrivance the object of which is to produce a result in something quite different; the subject has the means in its hand; to produce this result is merely its intention, its aim. The is the magician, but it conquers the thing by means of the thing itself. In magic, things show themselves as ideal. The ideality is thus a characteristic which belongs to them as things; it is an objective quality, which comes into consciousness by means of the very exercise of magic, and is itself only posited, made use of. Passion seizes on things in an immediate way. Now, however, consciousness reflects itself into itself, and inserts the thing itself as the destroying agent between itself and the thing, while it thereby shows itself as stratagem or cunning in not mixing itself up with the things and their strife. The change which is to be brought about may in one sense depend upon the nature of the means employed, but the principal thing is the will of the subject. This mediated magic is infinitely widespread, and it is difficult to define its limits and determine what is and what is not included in it. The principle of magic is that the connection between the means and the result is not known. Magic exists everywhere where this connection is merely present without being understood. The same thing holds good, too, of medicines in hundreds of cases, and all we can really do is to appeal to experience. The other alternative would be the rational course, namely, to get to know the nature of the remedy, and thus to deduce the change which it brings about. But the art of medicine refuses to adopt the plan of calculating the result from the nature of the remedy. We are simply told that this connection actually exists, and this is mere experience, which, however, contradicts itself endlessly. Thus Brown treated with opium, naphtha, spirit, &c., what was formerly cured by means of remedies of an entirely opposite nature. It is therefore difficult