[The Mystic Will by Charles Godfrey Leland]@TWC D-Link book
The Mystic Will

CHAPTER XI
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But we do _not_ seek for what is in us, therefore we remain nothing, and are nothing." Here the author very obscurely, yet vigorously, declares that we can do or learn what we _will_, but it must be achieved by foresight, will, and the aid of sleep.
It seems very evident, after careful study of the text, that here, as in many other places, our author indicates familiarity with the method of developing mental action in its subtlest and most powerful forms.
Firstly, by determined Foresight, and, secondly, by the aid of sleep, corresponding to the bringing a seed to rest a while, and thereby cause it to germinate; the which admirable simile he himself uses in a passage which I have not cited.
PARACELSUS was the most original thinker and the worst writer of a wondrous age, when all wrote badly and thought badly.

There is in his German writings hardly one sentence which is not ungrammatical, confused, or clumsy; nor one without a vigorous idea, which shows the mind or character of the man.
As a curious instance of the poetic originality of PARACELSUS we may take the following: "It is an error to suppose that chiromancy is limited to the hand, for there are significant lines (indicating character), all over the body.
And it is so in vegetable life.

For in a plant every leaf is a hand.
Man hath two; a tree many, and every one reveals its anatomy--a hand-anatomy.

Now ye shall understand that in double form the lines are masculine or feminine.

And there are as many differences in these lines on leaves as in human hands." GOETHE has the credit that he reformed or advanced the Science of Botany, by reducing the plant to the leaf as the germ or type; and this is now further reduced to the cell, but the step was a great one.
Did not PARACELSUS, however, give the idea?
"The theory of signatures," says VAUGHAN, in his _Hours with the Mystics_, "proceeded on the supposition that every creatures bears in some part of its structure.


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