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Dr. August Moehrlein, Ph. D., was a professor of the languages and / religions of India. A man of great gravity of countenance and of / impressive port, he was popularly reputed to have a complete knowledge / of the occult learning of the adepts of India, that nebulous and / mysterious philosophy which irreducible to the laws of nature as / recognized by Occidentals, is by them pronounced either magic and / feared as such, or ridiculed and despised as pretentious mummery and / deluding prestidigitation. There was a legend among the students of / his department that he was wont to project himself into the fourth / dimension and thus traveling downtown, effect a substantial saving of / street-car fare. This is clearly impossible, for the yogis do not thus / move about in their own persons. It is only the astral self that flies / leagues through the air with the rapidity of thought, only the / spiritual essence, the living man's ghost flying abroad while the / living man's corpse lies inanimate at home. But even this, Dr. August / Moehrlein could not do, for the yogis do not initiate men of Western / nations into their mysteries. Dr. Moehrlein's knowledge of the occult / of India was wholly empirical. He knew that certain things were done / and could recount them, but as to how they were done, he could tell / nothing.
It must not be thought that of all the marvelous and / awe-compelling things the yogis of India are accustomed to do, none / can be assigned to any other origin than cunning legerdemain and / hypnotism, or to the exercise of supernatural powers. Many of them are / due to a strange and wonderful knowledge of nature which the science / of the Occident has not yet reached in all its boasted advance. Yet / when once explained, the Westerner understands some of these phenomena / and is able to repeat them. Into this region of the penumbra of / science and exact knowledge the researches of Dr. Moehrlein had taken / him a little way and it was this that had gained him his reputation / among his pupils as a thaumaturgist.