Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/363

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wished to play a piece he knew. As I did not like it, I requested him not to play it; nevertheless he tried to do so and then, by means of my firm will that he should not, I succeeded in making him unable to remember the piece, in spite of all his endeavours." The thing is however brought to a climax when this immediate power of the will is extended even to inanimate bodies. However incredible this may appear, we have nevertheless two accounts of it coming from entirely different quarters. In the book just mentioned, 1 it is related and testified by witnesses, that Auguste K. caused the needle of the compass to deviate at one time 7 degrees and at another 4, this experiment moreover being repeated four times. She did this moreover without any use of her hands, through her mere will, by looking steadily at it. The Parisian somnambulist, Prudence Bernard, again in a public seance in London, at which Mr. Brewster, the physicist's son and two other gentlemen from among the spectators acted as jurors, made the compass needle deviate and follow her movements by simply turning her head round. 2

Now, if we thus see the will stated by me to be the thing–in–itself, the only real thing in all existence, the kernel of Nature, accomplish through the human individual, in Animal Magnetism and even beyond it, things which cannot be explained according to the causal nexus, i.e. in the regular course of Nature; if we find it in a sense even annulling Nature's laws and actually performing actio in distans [action at a distance], consequently manifesting a supernatural, that is, metaphysical, mastery over Nature, what corroboration better founded on fact could I desire for my doctrine ? Was not even Count Szápáry, a magnetiser

1 Mittheilungen über die Somnambule Auguste K. in Dresden. 1845, pp. 115, 116, and 318.

2 See extract from the English periodical Britannia, in Galignani's Messenger, of the 23rd October, 1851.

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