DEFINITIONS OF LIFE. 29 



and modes of being, but likewise concerning the laws of 

 external nature. All attempts at philosophical explication 

 were commenced by a mere effort of the understanding, 

 as the power of abstraction ; or by the imagination, trans- 

 ferring its own experiences to every object presented from 

 without. By the former, a class of phenomena were in 

 the first place abstracted, and fixed in some general term : 

 of course this could designate only the impressions made 

 by the outward objects, and so far, therefore, having been 

 thus metamorphosed, they were effects of these objects ; 

 but then made to supply the place of their own causes, 

 under the name of occult qualities. Thus the properties 

 peculiar to gold, were abstracted from those it possessed 

 in common with other bodies, and then generalized in the 

 term Aureity : and the inquirer was instructed that the 

 Essence of Gold, or the cause which constituted the pe- 

 culiar modification of matter called gold, was the power 

 of aureity. By the latter, i. e. by the imagination, thought 

 and will were superadded to the occult quality, and every 

 form of nature had its appropriate Spirit, to be controlled 

 or conciliated by an appropriate ceremonial. This was 

 entitled its SUBSTANTIAL FORM. Thus, physic became a 

 sort of dull poetry, and the art of medicine (for physiology 

 could scarcely be said to exist) was a system of magic, 

 blended with traditional empiricism. Thus the forms of 

 thought proceeded to act in their own emptiness, with no 

 attempt to fill or substantiate them by the information of 

 the senses, and all the branches of science formed so 

 many sections of logic and metaphysics. And so it con- 

 tinued, even to the time that the Reformation sounded 

 the second trumpet, and the authority of the schools sank 



