XT 



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 phe- 

 nomena 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 inquiring 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 ap- 

 peal to an inner power of which the senses are the mere 

 instruments and excitants. No fact is to him either orig- 

 inal or final. He cannot limit himself to the contempla- 

 tion of it alone, but endeavors 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 

 (362) 



