IM THE GREAT SECRET
Robert Houdin taught him certain things but remained silent about others which he declared he was unable to teach. I myself cannot account for these things,’ he said ‘they are a part of personal nature. If I told you them you would hardly be any the wiser and I could never put you in a position to make use of them’.
It s: if you will pardon the expression, the art or faculty of throwing dust in people s eyes. So you see, all types of magic have their ineffable arcana, even the white magic of Robert Houdin.
We have said already that it is a highly philanthropic act to fascinate simpletons to make them accept truth as if it were a lie and justice as if it were partiality and privilege, shifting the object of their egotism and covetousness so that they will be self- sacrificing down here in the hope of an immense and exclusive inheritance in Heaven.
But we must also say that all those who consider themselves worthy to be called men must, at the same time as they go along with the error of the young and weak, exert their reason and intelligence to the utmost to avoid being fascinated themselves.
Disillusionment is a cruel expericnce when there is nothing to replace the illusion, and vanished mirages and extinguished willo’-the-wisps leave the soul in darkness.
It is better to believe in absurdities than to believe in nothing; there is more value in being a dupe than in being a corpse. Nevertheless, wisdom precisely consists in a knowledge which is sufficiently solid and a faith which is sufficiently reasonable to exclude doubt. Doubt is really a groping ignorance. The wise man knows certain things and what he knows leads him to postulate the existence of what he does not know. Such a postulate is faith, which is no less certain than knowledge when it confines itself to necessary hypotheses and is not rash enough to define the indefinable.
A man who is really a man understands marvels without submitting to them; he believes in the truth without thunder or trumpets and no more needs to associate God with tablets of stone or an ark than with a golden calf. He does not even need to feel that he must be righteous because he has been told of a great rewarder or eternal avenger. He is sufficiently admonished by his conscience arid by reason. If he should be told, under pain of
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