the laws of external nature. All attempts at
philosophical explication were commenced by a mere effort of the
understanding, as the power of abstraction; or by the imagination,
transferring its own experiences to every object presented from without.
By the former, a class of phenomena were in the first place abstracted,
and fixed in some general term: of course this could designate only the
impressions made by the outward objects, and so far, therefore, having
been thus metamorphosed, they were effects of these objects; but then made
to supply the place of their own causes, under the name of occult
qualities. Thus the properties peculiar to gold, were abstracted from
those it possessed in common with other bodies, and then generalized in
the term _Aureity_: and the inquirer was instructed that the Essence of
Gold, or the cause which constituted the peculiar modification of matter
called gold, was the power of aureity. By the latter, _i.e._ by the
imagination, thought and will were superadded to the occult quality, and
every form of nature had its appropriate Spirit, to be controlled or
conciliated by an appropriate ceremonial. This was entitled its
SUBSTANTIAL FORM. Thus, physic became a sort of dull poetry, and the art
of medicine (for physiology could scarcely be said to exist) was a system
of magic, blended with traditional empiricism. Thus the forms of thought
proceeded to act in their own emptiness, with no attempt to fill or
substantiate them by the information of the senses, and all the branches
of science formed so many sections of logic and metaphysics. And so it
continued, even to the time that the Reformation sounded the second
trumpet, and the authority of the schools sank with that of the hierarchy,
under the intellectual courage and activity which this great revolution
had inspired. Power, once awakened, cannot rest in one object. All the
sciences partook of the new influences. The world of experimental
philosophy was soon mapped out for posterity by the comprehensive and
enterprising genius of Bacon, and the laws explained by which experiment
could be dignified into experience.(2) But no sooner was the impulse
given, than the same propensity was made manifest of looking at all things
in the one point of view which chanced to be of predominant attraction.
Our Gilbert, a man of genuine philosophical genius, had no sooner
multiplied the facts of magnetism, and extended our knowledge concerning
the property of