So interesting how we can now see — with more of us seeing every day, it seems — that the classic 19-century rational-skeptical materialist scientist with his principled scoffing and condescension toward any and all claims of the magical, supernatural, or paranormal was actually a powerful magician in his own right who cast a massive and long-lasting cultural spell of materialism and disenchantment whose special quality or shtick was to frame itself as pure, clear-eyed, hard-headed realism. An amazing feat, really. The preposterous glamour of a purely mechanistic-materialist view of reality, cast over all our collective minds and hiding behind its own deceptive facade. Maybe the best magic is the kind that successfully poses as anything but.