Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 2)

are infinitely more complex than Chess, a Chess played on an infinité boarci with men whose moves are indeterminate, and made still more difficult by the interférence of impondérable forces and unformulated laws; while its conduct demands not only the virtues, themselves rare enough, of intellectual and moral integrity, but intuition combining delicacy with strength in such perfection and to such extremes as to make its existence appear monstrous and miraculous against Nature. To admit this is not to discrédit oracles. On the contrary, the oracles fell mto disrepute just because they pretended to do more than they could. To divine concerning a matter is little more than to calculate probabilities. We obtain the use of minds who hâve access ro knowledge beyond ours, but not to omniscience. Hru; the gréai angel set over the Tarot, is beyond us as we are beyond the antj but, for ail we know, the knowledge of Hru is excelled by some mightier mind in the same proportion. Nor hâve we any warrant for accusing Hru of ignorance or error if we read the Taroi to our own delusion. He may hâve known, he may hâve spoken trulyj the fault may lie with our own insight.1 The Master Therion has observed on innumerable occasions that divinations, made by him and dismissed as giving untrue answers, hâve justified themselves months or years later when he was able to revise his judgment in perspective, untroubled by his Personal passion. It is mdeed surprising how often the most careless divinations give accurate answers. When things go wrong, it is almost always possible to trace thæ error to one’s own self-willed and insolent presumption in insisting that events shall accommodate themselves to our egoism and vanity. It is comically unscientific to adduce i. The question of the sense in which an answer is true arises. One not mix up the planes. Yet, as Mr. Russell shows, Of Cit. f. 61, the worlds which lie behind phenomena must possess the same structure as our own. Every proposition having a communicable significance must lie in just that essence of individuality which, for that very reason, is irrelevant to science , Just so : but this is to confess the impotence of science to attam truth, and to admit the urgency of developing a mental instrument of supenor capacity. — x73