THE WILL IN NATURE.
who certainly did not know my philosophy, led by the results of his own experience, after writing the title of his book: A word about Animal Magnetism, soul-bodies and vital essence, 1 to add the following remarkable explanatory words: "or physical proofs that the current of Animal Magnetism is the element, and the will, the principle of all spiritual and corporeal life"? 2 According to this, Animal Magnetism presents itself directly as practical Metaphysic, which was the term used by [Francis] Bacon of Verulam 3 to define Magic in his classification of the sciences: it is empirical or experimental Metaphysic. Further, because the will manifests itself in Animal Magnetism downright as the thing–in–itself, we see the principium individuationis [principle of individuation] (Space and Time), which belongs to mere phenomenon, at once annulled: its limits which separate individuals from one another, are destroyed; Space no longer separates magnetiser and somnambulist; community of thoughts and of motions of the will appears; the state of clairvoyance overleaps the relations belonging to mere phenomenon and conditioned by Time and Space, such as proximity and distance, the present and the future.
In consequence of these facts, notwithstanding many reasons and prejudices to the contrary, the opinion has gradually gained ground, nay almost raised itself to certainty, that Animal Magnetism and its phenomena are identical with part of the Magic of former times, of that ill-famed occult art, of whose reality not only the Christian ages by which it was so cruelly persecuted, but all, not excepting even savage, nations on the whole of the earth,
1 Szápáry, Ein Wort über Animalischen Magnetismus, Seelenkörper und Lebensessenz (1840).
2 "Oder physische Beweise, daß der Animalisch-magnetische Strom das Element und der Wille das Prinzip alles geistigen und Körperlichen Lebens sei."
3 Bacon, Instauratio Magna [Great Renewal], Book 3, Part 5, "On the dignity and enlargement of science."
ANIMAL
