"Stahl's theory of phlogiston was not a refined speculation. It scarcely deserves to be called a scientific hypothesis. It really amounted to nothing more than the assertion, that a body was combustible because it contained something combustible; which was equivalent to the identical proposition that a body burned because it burned. This declaration instead of being a refinement of philosophy, to which only a man of science could reach, was but the reduction to terms, of a vulgar belief. It was a poetical, rather than a scientific thought; for the natural tendency of every untrained imaginative mind, as we see in children, and in the early history of all nations, is to impute every manifestation of power, to the presence in the body manifesting it, of some inner principle more or less self-sustaining, and resembling a living or vital agent."