"Dismissing faith in the confused creeds of the heathen world, he reposed the greatest faith in the power of human wisdom. He did not know (perhaps no one in that age distinctly did) the limits which nature imposes on our discoveries. Seeing that the higher we mount in knowledge the more wonders we behold, he imagined that nature not only worked miracles in her ordinary course, but that she might, by the cabala of some master soul, be diverted from that course itself. Thus he pursued science across her appointed boundaries into the land of perplexity and shadow. Prom the truths of astronomy he wandered into astrological fallacy: from the secrets of chemistry he passed into the spectral labyrinth of magic; and he who could be skeptical as to the power of the gods was credulously superstitious as to the power of man." Such are the thoughts that Bulwer-Lytton, in the Last Days of Pompeii, puts into the mind of one of his characters, the Egyptian Arbaces. The reasoning by which such men justified the employment of their superior knowledge and insight to dupe the credulous was half philosophy, half knavery. If a man is the possessor of power unknown to the multitude except in its effects, why has he not the right to use it?—to use it first of all to enhance his authority and to draw from such authority the advantages that seem to him most desirable? We may well admit that a man of this stamp may have had an inward feeling akin to what we call conscience that would justify his attitude toward Ms fellows—yet he did not consider these Romans fellow men of his—but it was wholly of the intellect. Such a man is as much a philosopher as were the sophists of an earlier age, and, we may add, of our own day. They apprehend clearly certain superficial verities, but cease to inquire farther after they have discovered what they think needful and sufficient for their own aggrandizement. Far different was the class of witches, one of whom is introduced in the same novel. Against these Horace frequently raises his voice, as do also others of the rationalizing Romans. They are ignorant, and, in most instances, as much the dupes of their own juggleries as their victims. Every man who goes through the world with his mind alert can see specimens without especially looking for them. It is doubtful whether any man has ever lived who had not at least a modicum of superstition in him.