The means proposed indirectly by Swedenborg for communication with the supernatural world constitute an intermediate state allied to dream, ecstasy and catalepsy. The illuminated Swede affirmed the possibility of such a state, without furnishing any intimation as to the practices necessary for its attainment.[305] Perhaps his disciples, in order to supply the omission, might have had recourse to Indian Ceremonial Magic, when a genius came forward to complete the prophetic and Kabalistic intuitions of Swedenborg by a natural thaumaturgy. This man was a German physician named Mesmer. It was he who had the glory of rediscovering, apart from initiation and apart from occult knowledge, the universal agent of light and its prodigies. His _Aphorisms_, which scholars of his time regarded as a bundle of paradoxes, will ultimately form a basis for the physical synthesis.[306] Mesmer postulated two modes in natural being; these are substance and life, producing that fixity and movement which constitute the equilibrium of things. He recognised further the existence of a first matter, which is fluidic, universal, capable of fixity and motion; its fixation determines the constitution of substances, while its continual motion modifies and renews forms. This fluidic matter is active and passive; as passive it indraws and as active it projects itself. In virtue of this matter the world and those who dwell therein attract and repel; it passes through all by a circulation comparable to that of the blood. It maintains and renews the life of all beings, is the agent of their force and may become the instrument of their will. Prodigies are results of exceptional wills or energies. The phenomena of cohesion and elasticity, of density or subtlety in bodies, are produced by various combinations of these two properties in the universal fluid or first matter. Disease, like all physical disorders, is owing to a derangement in the normal equilibrium of the first matter in this or that organised body. Organised bodies are sympathetic or antipathetic to one another, by reason of their particular equilibrium. Sympathetic bodies may cure each other, restoring their equilibrium mutually. This capacity of bodies to equilibrate one another by the attraction or projection of the first matter, was called magnetism by Mesmer, and as it varies according to the forms in which it acts, he termed it animal magnetism when he studied its phenomena in living beings.