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

bodies, which the Democritean School patronizes, and which its vindicators and restorers, Petrus Gassendi and J. Christ. Magnenus, support. (5) The opinion of the Neo-Democriteans or Atomists in England—in a word, the corpuscularian philosophers who today triumph over almost all naturalists, among whom we easily venerate as prince Robert Boyle. For these philosophers add a certain figure to the exhaling magnetic atoms. It has pleased us, in explaining the proximate cause, to follow the doctrine of the Excellent Doctor, our President, Teacher, and Promoter, to be revered even to the ashes, which we have collected from his Curious Physical College and adapted to our work.

§. 15. That most celebrated man, just as in all fermentation, ebullition, and other motions, so too in magnetic actions, warns that one must look to a double ether. The one is termed by him empty, ingrained, thickened, and at rest; the other, however, is inflowing, rare, rarefying, mobile, full, and distended. Between the two there must intervene a consymbolism and sympathy; they must attack, join, and saturate one another in a just and proportionate sphere of activity so that from this, a change, alteration, confermentation, etc., of particles in mixed bodies may occur. For unless a certain and specific conformity intervenes between them, such motion will never succeed in nature. He declares this very thing with the following example: e.g., ☩ acid and ⊖ Alkali or lixivious ⊖ia alkaline substance are consymbolic, and they excite mutual motion in one another. For the ether that is in the acid, or the bubbles pregnant and distended with a certain specific tuous spirituous matter, has an analogous ether, but one that is exhausted and deprived of all tuous matter, in the alkali; for which cause, because of the congruence of both ethers, the motion succeeds immediately. But if you desire the reason, he adds it: he says that the distended ether never ceases to strive to project its tuous matter from its fullness, provided it can be received by an external vacuum. When, therefore, the specific tuous matter finds an equally specific vacuum ether...