heavens with its circle of light and fire (Cicero de natura deor. lib. i. c. 11.) Hippasus, Heraclitus, and Hippocrates imagined God as a reasoning and immortal fire, which permeates all things (Cudworth, Systema intellectuale, p. 104; and Gesnerus de animis Hippocratis.) Plato and Aristotle departed but little from this in their teachings; and Democritus called God the reason or soul in a sphere of fire (Stobacus, Eclogæ physicæ, lib. vii. c. x.) Cleonithes considered the sun as the highest God (Büsching, Grundriss einer Geschichte der Philosophie, I. Th. p. 344.) We find, therefore, in the earliest ages, an Ether theory, by which many modern theorists endeavour to explain the phenomena of magnetism.

"Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen nor can see" (Timothy, vi. 16).

"For with thee is the fountain of life; in thy light shall we see light" (Psalms, 38-9).

"Angels of light, the just, are as radiant as light; the light comes, and the glory; my right is the light of the nations; to be in light or in the living knowledge of Christ." "The Urim and Thummim. The light of wisdom, knowledge, illumination. And the earth shined with His glory."

This so-called system of emanation did not refer alone to the religious teachings and cosmology of the ancient nations of Asia and Egypt, but their whole philosophy was spiritual. Besides the Indian doctrines of the Zendavesta, in which Zoroaster's words regarding God, world, nature, and mankind, are contained, and the Oupnechat, the ancient Egyptian teachings agree with it; the Ĉabbalah; the Pythagoreans and Platonists, and the Alexandrians; the learned fathers of the Church, Origenes and Silesius; then the later Theosophists; the philosophi per ignem,-as Paracelsus, Adam von Boden, Jacob Gohorri; and, in the seventeenth century, Robert Fludd, Jacob Böhme, Poiret, Maxwell, Wirdig, Pordage, &c., all hold, with various modifications, this system of spiritual emanation. The Egyptians believed chaotic night a matter to be eternal with God.

The new

Platonists were of the opinion that nature or the world proceeded from God, as rays of light from the sun, and therefore of later origin than God—not according to time, but

nature. Others have imagined matter had always been in God, but, at a certain time, had proceeded from him and become formed.

The most ancient writing now extant upon the worldsoul, and the nature of things, is ascribed to Timæus of Locris. The principles of the Timæan doctrine are much as follows, according to Büsching:

"God shaped the eternal unformed matter by imparting to it His being. The inseparable united itself with the separable; the unvarying with the variable; and, moreover, in the harmonic conditions of the Pythagorean system. To comprehend all things better, infinite space was imagined as divided into three portions, which are,—the centre, the circumference, and the intermediate space. The centre is most distant from the highest God, who inhabits the circumference; the space between the two contains the celestial spheres. When God descended to impart His being, the emanations from Him penetrated the whole of heaven, and filled the same with imperishable bodies. Its power decreased with the distance from the source, and lost itself gradually in our world in minute portions, over which matter was still dominant. From this proceeds the continuous change of being and decay below the moon, where the power of matter predominates; from this, also, arise the circular movements of the heavens and the earth, the various rapidities of the stars, and the peculiar motion of the planets. By the union of God with matter, a third being was created, namely, the world-soul, which vitalizes and regulates all things, and occupies the space between the centre and the circumference."

A further description is to be met with in Brucker and Batteux (Histoire des causes premières).

This Timæan doctrine was afterwards defended with more or less acuteness and subtlety by Ocellus Lucanus, upon the origin of all things; Plato in his Timæus; Aristotle in his letters, upon the system of the world, to Alexander the Great, &c.

Modern philosophers have even admitted and described this world-soul in various manners, but without imagining it to be God. Thus Descartes considered space to be filled by a fluid matter, which he believed to be elementary and to

move in circles; he also believed it to be the source and germ of all things which surround the world and impel it onwards -(a species, therefore, of magnetic fluid.) Malebranche, Father Kircher, Huyghens, Leibnitz, Bernoulli, &c., entertained similar ideas. Search describes it as a spiritual being, filling the whole material world, and permeating its minutest space; as the first principle of nature, which makes of the world an animal, dependent upon the highest being. We shall at a later period refer to Paracelsus and his suc

cessors.

Others, the so-called Dualists, considered matter as coeval with God; as in nature, matter and active power, as it were, mutually influencing each other, without being on that account either one and the same, or created at different times. Plato had a similar philosophical theory:-" There are two things, of which the one is power, the other matter; in each, however, both are contained." (De natura ita dicebant, ut eam dividerent in res duas, ut altera esset efficiens, altera autem quasi huic se præbens, eaque efficeretur aliquid. In eo quod efficeret, vim esse censebant; in eo quod efficeretur, materiam, in utroque tamen utrumque, &c. Cicero, Acad. quæst. 1. i. sect. 24.) Zeno believed in two primary causes of things, passive matter and an active reason contained in matter, or God, who always is, and produces all things from matter. He describes God as æther, or fire, or the reason which permeates all things. God is the world-soul, and forms, in conjunction with the world, a living (spherical) being. The whole world and the heavens are the substance of God. To others, the Materialists, the sole being and the cause of all phenomena, &c., is matter.

Materialism, at least in its most refined form, was current among the Egyptians. Their eternal matter, night, was to them æther the material God. Orpheus, Musæus, and Hesiod, have, in their descriptions of natural objects, called matter night or chaos, and traced the origin of all things to its activity (Gesner's edition of the Works of Orpheus, p. 118.)

"Canam noctem, deorum pariter atque hominem genetricem; nox origo rerum omnium."

The opinions of philosophers concerning matter were, however, very various. Some denied to it all properties,

action, or forms; others saw properties and forms in it. The form was either one like the four elements and their variations, differing only in density or rarity; or they assumed that matter had more than one form, and to consist of minute indestructible particles,—that is, atoms. Strato, of Lampsacus, was of opinion that nothing else was necessary to the formation of the world from eternal matter than its hidden nature, with its peculiar motive and creative powers (Cicero, Acad. quæst. lib. ii. sect. 121.) Leucippus believed that the atoms themselves moved; and Democritus taught that they moved in infinite space unceasingly and perpendicularly downwards, where they came in contact with each other, and either united or were repulsed; and from which all things arise and decay. Epicurus held similar theories, which only differed in the details. The Stoic Zeno ascribed reason to the finest matter, or æther, from which all things are created,-being equal with God, whom he represented as an active fire. But, as he held nothing to be spiritual, so was God also corporeal, though of extraordinary purity compared to all other things, Other explanatory theories departed very much from these and from each other. So, for instance, the infinite chaos of Orpheus, which became an egg, and which the Peripatetics explained by saying that Orpheus meant night, existed before all things-even before God. The Pythagoreans and Platonists, however, explained it as meaning that Orpheus placed God first, who created the world from night. Jablonski (De mysteriis Ægyptiorum) believes that Orpheus derived his idea of the egg from the Egyptians, and maintains the meaning of Orpheus to have been, that God, being united throughout all time with matter in an infinite chaos, had formed chaos into the shape of an egg, and then developed His creative power.

From this brief enumeration of the most ancient views, we see that the modern theories have already long existed, and that the material explanation of the magnetic phenomena which has been propounded in our times is not new.

The other theories regarding the soul and the body, and the reciprocal influence of sympathy and antipathy, &c., are of great importance to magnetism; it is, therefore, worth while to see what history says upon this subject.

Dicæarchus introduces Pherecrates speaking, who con

sidered the soul to be an empty word, as nothing, and all the sentient and active powers as corporeal (Cicero, Tusc. quæst. lib. i. sect. 21.-" Nihil esse omnino animum, et hoc esse totum nomen inane, neque in homine inesse animum, etc.")

Seneca admits unhesitatingly that no one knew what the soul really was (Natural. quæst. lib. vii. c. 24); and Bonnet says the same (Analytical Investigation upon the Powers of the Soul)-"We know as little what is an idea in the soul as the soul itself."

On the contrary, Hayer maintains (La spiritualité et immortalité de l'âme, T. ii. p. 76), that we have of nothing so clear a perception as of our souls, and that this is even the foundation of all knowledge.

St. Macarius, in the ninth century, and Averrhoes admitted that but one soul existed in man (Büsching, p. 803).

The ancient Greeks believed a double soul to exist in all men—even a threefold one; that man had an animal (anima bruta) and a divine soul (divina). Even in Homer we find traces of this (Iliad, lib. v. 192, 193; Odyss. lib. 4, v. 14) The divine soul is called by him νοῦς, also φρήν-φρένες, the pit of the stomach, because even then the belief was common that the seat of the soul was in the stomach. The animal soul is called Θύμος.

Diogenes Laertius (De vitis,dogmat. et apophthegmat. clar. viror. lib. viii. segm. 30) writes:- Pythagoras and Plato gave two portions to the soul, one reasoning-λóyov-and one unreasoning-aλoyov-or, to speak more correctly, three, for they divided the unreasoning into the vμikov and TI-Svμikóv. It is remarkable that the poet-king ἐπι-θυμικόν. speaks of the soul in the pit of the stomach; so that even in the earliest ages the transposition of consciousness had been remarked, by which, as the Hindoos knew, the somnambulists see and hear through the pit of the stomach. Van Helmont at a later period transposed the seat of his Archæus entirely to the pit of the stomach; and in the year 1752 a Portuguese and several French physicians maintained that the soul is situated there (Hamburgh Medical Magazine, part viii. p. 647; and part x. p. 801).

Empedocles believed all men and animals to possess two