Translator's Note

This is the second part of Carl du Prel’s Die Magie als Naturwissenschaft, Die magische Psychologie, published at Jena by Hermann Costenoble in 1899 and dedicated to his friend Martin Greif. Where the first part, Die magische Physik, treats the forces du Prel believed to be at work in magic, this one turns to the soul that sets them going: the od of Reichenbach as the bearer of the life force, sensitive diagnosis and magnetic rapport, somnambulists as teachers, the stigma, maternal impressions and the dream oracle, suggestion as a key to an experimental magic, seeing at a distance, and the part played by the faith of the agent, the patient and the onlookers. It runs to 340 pages in eight chapters.

This translation is made from the page images of the New York Public Library’s copy, digitized by Google and kept on the Internet Archive. A few pages are cut at the inner margin or blotted at the edge in that scan; the words lost there are certain from what shows and from the sense, and each such page is recorded in the press’s working notes. A reader’s pencil marks and the library’s stamps in that copy are not part of the book and are left out. The scan’s machine-read text was used only to find places.

The English keeps du Prel’s eight chapters, with the subsections of the first, second, fifth and eighth, and his paragraphs as he printed them. Each heading is given in English and then as he printed it. His own footnotes stay beside the paragraph that carries them, numbered as he numbered them page by page; their titles are kept in the languages he cited them in. Words he set in spaced type are in italics. His Latin and French quotations are translated, with the original kept beside the English. Plain misprints are translated as meant; names are kept as printed. The publisher’s notice inside the cover, the title page and the dedication are translated in their places; the printer’s line is kept at the end; the publisher’s advertisements bound after the book are left out. The page numbers of 1899 are not reproduced.

The text is translated without modern commentary. A few notes, marked with a dagger and a roman numeral and gathered at the end, give the source of the motto and the wording of the Bible verses du Prel quotes or retells, in the King James and the Revised Standard Versions; each says where its information comes from.