380 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1868. The school of magicians has a great number of such occult 



qualities, as plants which will produce certain dreams, or will 

 repel poison when worn next the skin, &c. They had also the 

 remarkable stone which attracts iron, and we have it too. Put 

 all these things together, make the school of magical writers 

 include all the Schoolmen, and you may attribute to their philo- 

 sophy the treatment of occult causes. 



Their budget of facts was hampered with an immense number 

 of wonders handed down from the ancients. They were not 

 enough of our spirit to deny all they could not understand, so 

 they declared that the virtutes were of an occult character. Thus 

 the story, not rejected, of the Ark being still in existence on 

 Mount Ararat, made them pronounce that the glue which 

 fastened the timbers had an occult virtue ; and if you and I 

 believed the fact, we should say the same. The great error of 

 the Schoolmen was too easy belief in antiquity ; the great crime 

 they are charged with is declaring that what they did not know 

 was hidden from them. 



When Leibnitz attacked gravitation he called it an occult 

 quality, not cause. If you can put me on the scent of any 

 doctrine of occult causes, I will follow it up. 



When Agrippa wrote De Vanitate Artium against all that 

 he had explained in the De Occulta Pliilosopliia, and against every- 

 thing else, his chapters against logic and sophism have not a word 

 about the matter. Ludovicus Yives, who also satirised every- 

 thing, is equally free. I do not recollect any satire on the sub- 

 ject in any old writers, however fierce they may be against the 

 scholastic writers. 



You say elsewhere that the following proposition is not 

 intelligible : ' Abracadabra is a second intention.' Literally, 

 ' animal is a second intention ' may be held false, not un- 

 intelligible. For a second intention is a subjective use of a name. 

 Probably you mean that the proposition ' Abracadabra is a (name 

 of) second intention' is unintelligible. But why more than 

 ' animal ' ? If you mean that Abracadabra is a mere sound, you 

 do less than due honour to the name of a medical instrument of 

 1,200 years' life. I suspect you are not aware that no less an 

 authority than Serenus Samonicus, in the Carmen de Medicina, 

 (perhaps you don't care for his authority), lays it down that the 

 word thus treated 



