Magic, White and Black

Forget the candles and the conjured demons for a moment. Hartmann opens by taking the word back: whatever ignorance has made of it, magic's only true meaning is “The Highest Science, or Wisdom, based upon knowledge and practical experience.”

That puts magic inside nature, not above it. A power standing outside nature, or somehow located above it, would be in his words an absurdity and a superstition, contradicted by everything we actually observe.

So when he calls something magical, he is not claiming a break in the order of things. He is pointing at the order of things itself, and asking why we stopped finding it strange.

If you want proof that magic exists, Hartmann's advice is blunt: open your eyes and look at a tree.

Nobody builds a tree the way a mason builds a house, laying stone on stone from the outside. A seed does not become a tree, nor a child an adult, because some workman keeps adding material. Living things grow from a centre within. Influences flow toward that centre from the great storehouse of matter and motion, and from there they radiate outward and do the building.

He adds a dry observation. If you had never seen it happen, you would call it foolish to believe a tree could come out of a seed, since there is plainly no tree inside one. We accept it only because we see it every day.

What kind of power does that building? Hartmann rules out two answers.

It cannot be mechanical, because a mechanical force ceases the moment the impulse behind it stops, while the stream of life keeps going and only its forms die. It cannot be chemical, because chemical action ends once the substances have combined. What remains is a living, lawful, ordering power, which he calls the One Life, acting in the life-centre of every form.

Hence his startling claim: every plant, every animal and every person is a magician, using that power unconsciously and by instinct to build its own body. The real question is whether a person could ever do on purpose what she already does without knowing.

Why does Hartmann insist that the power which grows a living thing cannot be a mechanical force?

• Because a mechanical force stops when its impulse stops, while life keeps flowing✓Correct answer
• Because mechanical forces obey fixed laws, and the power of life obeys none
• Because mechanical forces act only on dead matter, never on seeds or bodies
• Because the science of his day had not yet measured what makes plants grow

His test is endurance: a push ends when the pushing ends, but life outlasts every form it builds. The second option gets him backwards, since he stresses that this power acts according to law and order, which is exactly why he ranks it above blind force.

Can a human being learn to govern that power? Hartmann answers with a question of his own: what do you mean by “man”?

If you mean the intellectual animal we pass in the street every day, the answer is no. Most people, he says, the most celebrated scientists included, know nothing about their own inner nature, and many have not even decided whether they believe they have a soul.

If you mean the intelligent principle at work inside that animal, the thing that makes it human, the answer is yes. That principle is the same power acting at nature's centre. Once a person knows the powers that belong to her real self and how to use them, she can pass from the passive state into the active one.

This is where the book parts company with the sensational occultism of its day. The art of magic, Hartmann writes, uses invisible agencies to get visible results. But those agencies are not beings flitting about in empty space, waiting for whoever has learned the right incantation.

They are mostly the unseen but powerful influences of the emotions and the will: desire and passion, thought and imagination, love and hate, fear and hope, faith and doubt. He calls them the powers of the soul.

And nobody is exempt. Everyone uses them every day, consciously or not, willingly or not. You used them this morning, when a mood you never chose decided how your first conversation of the day would go.