in the composition of all bodies, and having perceived it to be the essential agent of that spontaneous movement which is called life in animals and vegetation in plants, they conceived the mechanism and harmony of the universe, as of a homogeneous whole, of one identical body, whose parts, though distant, had nevertheless an intimate relation;* and the world was a living being, animated by the organic circulation of an igneous and even electrical fluid,** which, by a term of comparison borrowed first from men and animals, had the sun for a heart and a focus.***

     * These are the very words of Jamblicus.  De Myst.  Egypt.

** The more I consider what the ancients understood by ether and spirit, and what the Indians call akache, the stronger do I find the analogy between it and the electrial fluid.  A luminous fluid, principle of warmth and motion, pervading the universe, forming the matter of the stars, having small round particles, which insinuate themselves into bodies, and fill them by dilating itself, be their extent what it will.  What can more strongly resemble electricity?

*** Natural philosophers, says Macrobius, call the sun the heart of the world.  Som.  Scrip. c. 20.  The Egyptians, says Plutarch, call the East the face, the North the right side, and the South the left side of the world, because there the heart is placed.  They continually compare the universe to a man; and hence the celebrated microcosm of the Alchymists.  We observe, by the bye, that the Alchymists, Cabalists, Free-masons, Magnetisers, Martinists, and every other such sort of visionaries, are but the mistaken disciples of this ancient school:  we say mistaken, because, in spite of their pretensions, the thread of the occult science is broken.

“From this time the physical theologians seem to have divided into several classes; one class, grounding itself on these principles resulting from observation; that nothing can be annihilated in the world; that the elements are indestructible; that they change their combinations but not their nature; that the life and death of beings are but the different modifications of the same atoms; that matter itself possesses properties which give rise to all its modes of existence; that the world is eternal,* or unlimited in space and duration; said that the whole universe was God; and, according to them, God was a being, effect and cause, agent and patient, moving principle and thing moved, having for laws the invariable properties that constitute fatality; and this class conveyed their idea by the emblem of Pan (the great whole); or of Jupiter, with a forehead of stars, body of planets, and feet of animals; or of the Orphic Egg,** whose yolk, suspended in the center of a liquid, surrounded by a vault, represented the globe of the sun, swimming in ether in the midst of the vault of heaven;*** sometimes by a great round serpent, representing the heavens where they placed