Method: Placement of physical magnets on and around the (human) body.

What we thereby assume: The powers that heal the human body must arrive from outside of it. Disease is physical-mechanical, and so healing must be as well. Bodies and physical forces can only be influenced by other physical bodies.

The treatment instruments here are physical things because bodily life is a mechanical process. But we are talking about magnets here, whose force is real but invisible. So understanding the effectual mechanics presents a problem. The intervention into the ailing body is not the familiar cleaving force of a blade, and the object we seek to change is nothing empirical having color, plasticity, and form. Magnetic therapy treats another kind of stuff with another kind of force. The stuff is subtle, passing through everything all the time—including you, right where you are sitting now—but without ever hitting our cognitive-perceptual organs, or any of our measuring instruments (besides magnets). But it does hit us.

This stuff is the life fluid—the material analog of consciousness. We feel it but cannot perceive it as an object. This is the truth in Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism: we feel that consciousness is substantial and so must rest on a substance.