and dramatic aspects of events.[335]

[335] Until the seventeenth century this mode of thought prevailed. One
need only recall the dramatic treatment even of mechanical questions by
Aristotle, as, for example, his explanation of the power of the lever
to make a small weight raise a larger one. This is due, according to
Aristotle, to the generally miraculous character of the circle and of
all circular movement. The circle is both convex and concave; it is
made by a fixed point and a moving line, which contradict each other;
and whatever moves in a circle moves in opposite directions.
Nevertheless, movement in a circle is the most "natural" movement; and
the long arm of the lever, moving, as it does, in the larger circle,
has the greater amount of this natural motion, and consequently
requires the lesser force. Or recall the explanation by Herodotus of
the position of the sun in winter: It moves to the south because of the
cold which drives it into the warm parts of the heavens over Libya. Or
listen to Saint Augustine's speculations: "Who gave to chaff such
power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power
to warm that it ripens green fruit? Who can explain the strange
properties of fire itself, which blackens all that it burns, though
itself bright, and which, though of the most beautiful colors,
discolors almost all that it touches and feeds upon, and turns blazing
fuel into grimy cinders? ... Then what wonderful properties do we find
in charcoal, which is so brittle that a light tap breaks it, and a
slight pressure pulverizes it, and yet is so strong that no moisture
rots it, nor any time causes it to decay." City of God, book xxi, ch.
iv.

Such aspects of things as these, their naturalness and unnaturalness
the sympathies and antipathies of their superficial qualities, their
eccentricities, their brightness and strength and destructiveness, were
inevitably the ways in which they originally fastened our attention.

If you open early medical books, you will find sympathetic magic
invoked on every page. Take, for example, the famous vulnerary
ointment attributed to Paracelsus. For this there were a variety of
receipts, including usually human fat, the fat of either a bull, a wild
boar, or a bear, powdered earthworms, the usnia, or mossy growth on the
weathered skull of a hanged criminal, and other materials equally
unpleasant--the whole prepared under the planet Venus if possible, but
ne