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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 thunder- 

 storm ; 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 



