222 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



net " possessing a magnetic power by which he may 

 attract certain effluvia of a good or evil quality in the same 

 manner as a magnet will attract iron." This is merely an 

 attribution, in fact, to man of the attractive quality which 

 the ancient writers were so fond of expressing as pertain- 

 ing to the Deity, and as metaphorically illustrated by the 

 drawing power of the magnet or amber. The old poets 

 and philosophers as I have shown constantly personified 

 the magnet and spoke of its love, or its appetite, for the 

 iron. Paracelsus simply reverses the figure, and, instead of 

 attributing to the magnet the capacities of the man, gives 

 to the man the capacities of the magnet. The metaphors 

 of the poets became more literal after that. The differ- 

 ence is apparent between Gautier d'Epinois' asseveration 

 that all the world turns to his lady because of her beauty, 

 even as the needle to the lodestone, and the complaint 



You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant, 

 But yet you draw not iron, for my heart 

 Is true as steel 



of Helena following Demetrius. It is a reflection of the 

 Paracelsan notion and not a gross allusion to the medi- 

 aeval u flesh-magnet" which is thus found in the only 

 extended reference to the lodestone which Shakespeare 

 makes. 



"A magnet," continues the astrologer elaborating his 

 theories, "may be prepared from iron that will attract iron ; 

 and a magnet may be prepared out of some vital substance 

 that will attract vitality." Such a substance, he holds, is 

 one which has remained for a time in the human body; 

 and it may serve to allay inflammation because "it will 

 attract the superabundance of magnetism carried to that 

 place by the rush of the blood." Diseases can be trans- 

 planted from the human frame into the earth by similar 

 means. As to the lodestone itself, Paracelsus asserts that 

 it " attracts all martial humors that are in the human 

 system;" and that "martial diseases are caused by auras 



