Inaugural Physico-Medical Dissertation on the Magnetism of the Macrocosm and Microcosm

[either sympathy or antipathy] as its foundation and principle. The same judgment must be passed when it is called the rapture of likes and the mutual love of things, since this is done equally inadequately and without the law of simple conversion. It is also called attractive action, not that which presupposes some inexplicable faculty of the ancients as a principle, but which, according to the mind of the moderns, presupposes a real exhalation of spirituous effluvia from a body acting magnetically. For that reason, it also deserves to be called action through the spirituous effluvia of the agent alone, or the action of an agent without corporal contact, in that magnetic action is received at the terminus through virtual contact alone. It is also called Magnetism, just as the magnet is a deceitful stone, an action of deceit, not in that famous sense in which deceitful deeds always presuppose a higher and supernatural cause and commerce with it, but in the most sound sense, by which the affection attached to magnetic action, namely its inexplicable and at first glance inscrutable difficulty, is indicated; since the spectators of these effects, especially the more somnolent and simple ones, seeing these things, judge themselves to be deceived by the mockery and deceit of singular phantasms. Finally, it is called the action of occult qualities, truly indeed, as a document of a deeper inquiry than magnetism demands in Physics, but falsely, if a safe but shameful asylum is sought for ignorance and sloth in the scrutiny of the more intricate and difficult Magnetism.

§. 5. We impose a closure on the first part of this chapter with (3.) Homonymy. But let us explain the same by three points: that magnetism is said so either properly or improperly. Properly, as in Physics and as examined here: Improperly, insofar as it is adapted to moral and political matters, not so much in a philosophical as an oratorical style, such as Christian Adolph Balduin's Treatise: The Hermetic Upper and Lower Gold and Upper and Lower Aura, edited under the anagrammatized author: