of natural phenomena.

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XV. ELEMENTARY MAGNETISM.

A LECTURE TO SCHOOLMASTERS.

WE have no reason to believe that the sheep or the dog, or indeed any
of the lower animals, feel an interest in the laws by which natural
phenomena are regulated. A herd may be terrified by a thunderstorm;
birds may go to roost, and cattle return to their stalls, during a
solar eclipse; but neither birds nor cattle, as far as we know, ever
think of enquiring into the causes of these things. It is otherwise
with Man. The presence of natural objects, the occurrence of natural
events, the varied appearances of the universe in which he dwells
penetrate beyond his organs of sense, and appeal to an inner power of
which the senses are the mere instruments and excitants. No fact is
to him either original or final. He cannot limit himself to the
contemplation of it alone, but endeavours to ascertain its position in
a series to which uniform experience assures him it must belong. He
regards all that he witnesses in the present as the efflux and
sequence of something that has gone before, and as the source of a
system of events which is to follow. The notion of spontaneity, by
which in his ruder state he accounted for natural events, is
abandoned; the idea that nature is an aggregate of independent parts
also disappears, as the connection and mutual dependence of physical
powers become more and more manifest: until he is finally led to
regard Nature as an organic whole--as a body each of whose members
sympathises with the rest, changing, it is true, from age to age, but
changing without break of continuity in the relation of cause and
effect.

The system of things which we call Nature is, however, too vast and
various to be studied first-hand by any single mind. As knowledge
extends there is always a tendency to subdivide the field of
investigation. Its various parts are taken up by different minds, and
thus receive a greater amount of attention than could possibly be
bestowed on them if each investigator aimed at the mastery of the
whole. The centrifugal form in which knowledge, as a whole, advances,
spreading ever wider on all sides, is due in reality to the exertions
of individuals, each of whom directs his efforts, more or less, along
a single line. Accepting, in many respects, his culture from his
fellow-men--taking it from spoken words or from written books--in some
one direction, the student of Nature ough