magnetic bodies, but all things in heaven, and earth, and
in the waters beneath the earth, were resolved into magnetic influences.

Shortly after a new light was struck by Harriott and Descartes, with their
contemporaries, or immediate predecessors, and the restoration of ancient
geometry, aided by the modern invention of algebra, placed the science of
mechanism on the philosophic throne. How widely this domination spread,
and how long it continued, if, indeed, even now it can be said to have
abdicated its pretensions, the reader need not be reminded. The sublime
discoveries of Newton, and, together with these, his not less fruitful
than wonderful application, of the higher mathesis to the movements of the
celestial bodies, and to the laws of light, gave almost a religious
sanction to the corpuscular system and mechanical theory. It became
synonymous with philosophy itself. It was the sole portal at which truth
was permitted to enter. The human body was treated of as an hydraulic
machine, the operations of medicine were solved, and alas! even directed
by reference partly to gravitation and the laws of motion, and partly by
chemistry, which itself, however, as far as its theory was concerned, was
but a branch of mechanics working exclusively by imaginary wedges, angles,
and spheres. Should the reader chance to put his hand on the "Principles
of Philosophy," by La Forge, an immediate disciple of Descartes, he may
see the phenomena of sleep solved in a copper-plate engraving, with all
the figures into which the globules of the blood shaped themselves, and
the results demonstrated by mathematical calculations. In short, from the
time of Kepler(3) to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only
all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and
organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured
within the magic circle of mathematical formulae. And now a new light was
struck by the discovery of electricity, and, in every sense of the word,
both playful and serious, both for good and for evil, it may be affirmed
to have electrified the whole frame of natural philosophy. Close on its
heels followed the momentous discovery of the principal gases by Scheele
and Priestly, the composition of water by Cavendish, and the doctrine of
latent heat by Black. The scientific world was prepared for a new dynasty;
accordingly, as soon as Lavoisier had reduced the infinite variety of
chemical phen