 He used the term "magic" to mean sympathetic magic, describing it as a practice relying on the magician's belief "that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy", something which he described as "an invisible ether".He further divided this magic into two forms, the "homeopathic (imitative, mimetic)" and the "contagious".The former was the idea that "like produces like", or that the similarity between two objects could result in one influencing the other.