Birmingham.
[_The Night Side of Nature_ would seem to indicate that its ingenious,
yet sober and judicious, authoress had forestalled the "Folk-lore"
investigations of the projected Cambridge Society. Probably some of its
members will not rest satisfied with a simple collection of phenomena
relating to communications with the unseen world, but will exclaim with
Hamlet--
"Thou com'st in such a questionable shape,
That I will _speak_ to thee!"
and will endeavour to ascertain the _philosophy_ of those
communications, as Newton did with the recorded data and phenomena of
the mechanical or material universe. Whether the transcripts of some of
the voluminous unpublished writings of Dionysius Andreas Freher,
deposited in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 5767-5792.), will assist the
inquirer in his investigations, we cannot confidently state; but in
them he will find continual references to what Jacob Böhme terms "the
eternal and astral magic, or the laws, powers and properties of the
great Universal Will-Spirit of the two co-eternal worlds of darkness
and light, and of this third or temporary principle." Freher was the
principal illustrator of the writings of the celebrated Jacob Böhme,
now exciting so much interest among the German literati; and, if we may
credit William Law, it was from the principles of this remarkable man
that Sir Isaac Newton derived his theory of fundamental powers. (See
"N. & Q.," Vol. viii., p. 247.) But on this and other matters we may
doubtless expect to be well informed by Sir David Brewster, in his new
"Memoir of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton."
According to Law, the two-fold spiritual universe stands as near, and
in a similar relation to this material mixed world, of darkness and
light, evil and good, death and life, or rather the latter to the
former, as water does to the gases of which it is essentially
compounded.--ED.]
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