Lives of the Necromancers

Lives of the Necromancers

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Title: Lives of the Necromancers
Author: William Godwin
Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7082] [This file was first
posted on March 8, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS:
OR
AN ACCOUNT OF THE MOST EMINENT PERSONS IN
SUCCESSIVE AGES, WHO HAVE CLAIMED FOR THEMSELVES,
OR TO WHOM HAS BEEN IMPUTED BY OTHERS,
THE
EXERCISE OF MAGICAL POWER.
BY WILLIAM GODWIN.
LONDON
Frederick J Mason, 444, West Strand
1834

PREFACE.
The main purpose of this book is to exhibit a fair delineation of the
credulity of the human mind. Such an exhibition cannot fail to be
productive of the most salutary lessons.
One view of the subject will teach us a useful pride in the abundance of
our faculties. Without pride man is in reality of little value. It is pride
that stimulates us to all our great undertakings. Without pride, and the
secret persuasion of extraordinary talents, what man would take up the
pen with a view to produce an important work, whether of imagination
and poetry, or of profound science, or of acute and subtle reasoning and

intellectual anatomy? It is pride in this sense that makes the great
general and the consummate legislator, that animates us to tasks the
most laborious, and causes us to shrink from no difficulty, and to be
confounded and overwhelmed with no obstacle that can be interposed
in our path.
Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between man and the
inferior animals. The latter live only for the day, and see for the most
part only what is immediately before them. But man lives in the past
and the future. He reasons upon and improves by the past; he records
the acts of a long series of generations: and he looks into future time,
lays down plans which he shall be months and years in bringing to
maturity, and contrives machines and delineates systems of education
and government, which may gradually add to the accommodations of
all, and raise the species generally into a nobler and more honourable
character than our ancestors were capable of sustaining.
Man looks through nature, and is able to reduce its parts into a great
whole. He classes the beings which are found in it, both animate and
inanimate, delineates and describes them, investigates their properties,
and records their capacities, their good and evil qualities, their dangers
and their uses.
Nor does he only see all that is; but he also images all that is not. He
takes to pieces the substances that are, and combines their parts into
new arrangements. He peoples all the elements from the world of his
imagination. It is here that he is most extraordinary and wonderful. The
record of what actually is, and has happened in the series of human
events, is perhaps the smallest part of human history. If we would know
man in all his subtleties, we must deviate into the world of miracles and
sorcery. To know the things that are not, and cannot be, but have been
imagined and believed, is the most curious chapter in the annals of man.
To observe the actual results of these imaginary phenomena, and the
crimes and cruelties they have caused us to commit, is one of the most
instructive studies in which we can possibly be engaged. It is here that
man is most astonishing, and that we contemplate with most admiration
the discursive and unbounded nature of his faculties.
But, if a