Part 26 (2/2)

_Pantheia_

Yes, I feel weakness, hunger, and thirst. I remember now that I was well, when suddenly a strange thought came to me on my pillow. I thought that I was dead. This took such possession of me that it shut out every other thought, and being able to think only that one thought, I must have been dead. It seemed but a moment's time when the spell of the thought was broken by an alien deep voice from the void of nothing about me, calling me by name, calling me to wake and see the day. With that came floods of my own old thoughts, like molten streams from aetna, that were rigid as granite before the word was given that loosed them.

_Empedocles_

Did you not see new things or new lands or old dead faces, for you have been gone a month? I am curious to know.

_Pantheia_

How pa.s.sing strange! No, I saw neither darkness nor light. I heard no sounds, nor was conscious of any silence. I must have had just the one thought that I was dead, but I lost consciousness of that thought. I remember saying good night to Zaldu, and I handed her the quaint doll from Egypt and bade her care for it. Then the thought seized me, and I knew no more. My thoughts which had always run so freely before, like a plas.h.i.+ng brook, must have suddenly frozen, as the amber-trader from the Baltic told me one day the rivers do in his far northern home. Oh, sir, are you going so soon?

_Empedocles_

Yes, child. You must take nourishment now, and talk no more. But I am coming again to see you, for I have many earnest questions still to put regarding this singular adventure.

_Akron_

Let me walk with you. I will close the great door. Already the gay streets are silent, and the people crowd this way, whispering awe-struck together of the deed of wonder you have done this day. You have called back the dead to life, and they make obeisance to you as you pa.s.s, as if you were in truth a son of the immortals. Your name will go down the ages linked with the miracle of Pantheia. You are immortal.

_Empedocles_

Nay, 'tis not so strange as that, and yet 'tis stranger.

_Akron_

I would know your meaning better.

_Empedocles_

The power of a thought, that is the real wonder! We just begin to have glimpses of the effects of the mind upon the body. To me, Akron, the faculty has set too great store upon herbs and bitter drafts, and cutting with the knife. I would fain have the soul acknowledged more, our therapy built on the dual mechanism of mind and substance. For if an idea can lead to the apparent death of the whole body, so might other ideas bring about the apparent death of a part of the body, like, for example, a paralysis of the members, or of the senses of sight, feeling, hearing; and in truth I have seen such things. Or a thought might give rise to a pain, or to a feeling of general illness, or to a feeling of local disorder in some internal organ; and I feel sure I have likewise met with such instances. And if an idea may produce such ailments, then a contrary idea implanted by the physician may heal them. I believe this to be the secret of many of the marvels we see at the temples and shrines of aesculapius and of the cures made by the touch of seers and kings.

But this teaching goes much deeper and further. If we could in the schools implant in our youth ideas which were strong enough, we should be able to make of them all, each in proportion to his belief in himself and his ambition, great men, great generals, thinkers, poets, a new race of heroes in all lines of human endeavor, who should be able by their united strength of idea and ideal finally to people the world with G.o.ds.

I have among my slaves, who work as vintners and olive-gatherers, a physician of Thrace, as also a philosopher of the island of Rhodes, a member of the Pythagorean League. These I bought not long ago from the Etruscan pirates. Every evening I have them come to me on the roof after the evening meal, and there under the quiet of the stars we discuss life and death, the soul and immortality, and all the burning problems of order, harmony, and number in the universe. What surprises me is that this Thracian should be so in advance of the physicians of h.e.l.las, for he holds as I do that the mind should be first considered in the treatment of most disorders of the body, because of its tremendous power to force the healing processes, and because sometimes it actually induces disease and death. And we have talked together of the incalculable value of faith and enthusiasm so applied in the education of the child, this new kind of gardening in the budding soul of mankind, and of what new and august races might thereby come to repeople this rather unsatisfactory globe.

I am minded to free these slaves, indeed all my slaves, and I have the intention of devoting the most of a considerable fortune, both inherited and ama.s.sed by me, to the spread of these doctrines and to the public weal, particularly in the matter of planting in the souls of our youth, not the mere ability to read and write Greek and do sums in arithmetic, but the seeds of n.o.ble ideas that shall make this Trinacria of ours a still more wonderful human garden than it has been as a granary for the world's practical needs. From this sea-centre we send our freighted galleys to Gades in the West, Carthage in the South, Tyre in the East, and to the red-bearded foresters of the Far North. I would still send on these same routes this food, but also better food than this, stuff that should kindle and feed intellectual fires in all the remote places of the earth.

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