III. Animal Magnetism as the Key to Magical Physics

III. Animal Magnetism as the Key to Magical Physics.III. Der animalische Magnetismus als Schlüssel zur magischen Physik.

It is the fault of science, or rather of its representatives, always to think too highly of the state of knowledge at any given time, and too little of its capacity for development. The work done is overrated, and the work still to be done underrated. We know only a number of forces and laws, and yet we want to explain the whole of nature from these. But that would still allow an extension of our knowledge, though no longer a deepening of it, and it is from a deepening that most would be hoped.

It would therefore be very important if we could gain the insight that there are still unknown forces and laws, and this insight can be gained only by the one road of holding to those phenomena of nature which cause us the most embarrassment, indeed which seem impossible to us by the present state of our knowledge, because we know only the laws they contradict, and not those they correspond to. But there must at all times be such phenomena, because nature makes use of its forces before man discovers them.