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521. Can certain spirits advance the progress of the arts by protecting those who cultivate them?

"There are special spirit-protectors who assist those by whom they are invoked when they judge them to be worthy of their help; but what could they do with those who fancy themselves to be what they are not? They cannot make the blind to see, nor the deaf to hear."

The ancients converted these spirit-guardians into special deities. The Muses were nothing else than the allegoric personification of the spirit-protectors of arts and sciences, just as the spirit-protectors of the family-circle designated by the name of Lares or of Penates. Among the moderns, the arts, the various industries, cities, countries, have also their protecting patrons, who are no other than spirit-guardians of a higher order, but under different names.

Each man having his sympathetic spirit, it follows that, in every collective whole, the generality of sympathetic spirits corresponds to the generality of individuals that stranger-spirits are attracted to it by identity of thoughts: in a word, that these assemblages, as well as individuals, are more or less favourably surrounded, influenced, assisted, according to the predominant character of the thoughts of those who compose them.

Among nations, the conditions which exercise an attractive action upon spines are the habits, manners, dominant characteristics, of their people, and, above all, their legislation, because the character of a nation is reflected in its laws. Those who uphold the reign of righteousness, among themselves combat the influence of evil spirits. Wherever the laws consecrate injustice, inhumanity, good spirits are in the minority and the mass of bad ones who flock in, attracted by that state of things, keep the people in their false ideas, and paralyze the good influences which, being only partial, are lost in the crowd, like a solitary wheat-ear in the midst of tares. It is therefore easy, by studying the characteristics of nations, or of any assemblage of men, to form to oneself an idea of the invisible population which is mixed up with them in their thoughts and in their actions.