"The first thing you must disabuse yourself of is that there is any such thing as magic." Spake the old wizard Kaitos. It was, his apprentice thought, not the most auspicious start to his first true magic lesson.
"But master, how can you say that when I have seen you work magic before?" Abe wheedled.
"Oh, have you?" The old sophist smirkingly condescended, stroking his grey beard as he regarded the boy sitting crosslegged on his workroom rug. "What magic exactly do you remember me working?"
Abe bristled at the tone, and struggled not to let it show on his face; though he was sure it did. Just when he thought he had proven himself capable and responsible enough to be let into the wizard's confidences and gain the wondrous treasures of knowledge he had been promised, so it turned out to be yet another opportunity for the lore-miser to humble him further.
"I have witnessed you brew potions for castle lords going off to battle that can do in moments what takes a physicker weeks or months to heal, I have seen you bewitch the mind of a peasant who darkened your door, I have seen you call unwholesome spirits into a chalk circle and scribe amulets with celestial figures that can turn away any blade or arrow arrayed against the bearer." Abe said, arms folded resolutely. "How can you do such things and tell me there is no such thing as magic? You cannot expect me to believe that such feats are all mummery!"
"Mummery? Who said anything about mummery!?" Kaitos cried out, drawing himself up to his full height in indignation. "You reckon me for an actor? Lower even than a harlot, whose work at least has the virtue of truth? Is that what you think my implication is, boy? Or was I wasting my breath teaching you what rudiments of rhetoric will fit in your peasant skull?"
Rhetoric? So, this was a test, not a lecture. He had missed something vital in his master's meaning.
"So... the works you enacted are true, but magic is not? So, they are not magic but part of natural philosophy?" The boy hazarded. At this is master let out a bark of derision.
"Philosophy? No, no, no, boy. There is no philosophy to it. What constancy can one expect of djinn? What can you learn about God from the hypnotic Will? Philosophy forms a corpus, a chain of wisdom in which each link must be bound to its neighbours." The greymaned flummoxer decreed. "Think, boy, prove I haven't been wasting my wisdom on your misbegotten ears."
Abe frowned at this, and set his chin upon his fist as the woodcuts showed great minds of antiquity in thought, as if that too would act as a talisman. After a long moment of silence, his eyes lit up.
"There's no link between them at all! That's what you mean!" The apprentice cawed, delightedly.
Kaitos gathered his beard in the ring of his thumb and forefinger and swept it to a point, as he was want to do when mildly pleased, and Abe knew he had hit the mark. Nevertheless his master commanded "Expound."
"The distillation of virtues into forms that can be imbibed, the empowerment and projection of spiritus to influence that of another, the geometries and resonances that can call up and command all manner of creatures of the upper air, and the correspondences that can entangle a disc of pure metal with the influence of the stars. The one thing these all have in common; nothing. They are all distinct and divisible acts, in no way related to each other in theory or practice. There is no such thing as magic, for magic is a blanket thrown over a collection of unrelated mysteries." Abe folded his arms in satisfaction, sure that was right.
"At last, we come upon the exactitude." Kaitos responded, his beard having been smoothed into a fox's tail. "Yes boy, let it be known that every spell cast, every philter poured from your cauldron, every meditation and eastern art, all of them are singular mysteries, clawed from the baffling darkness at the edges of the world."
"So you are an actor then, pretending at scholarship." Abe replied, so buoyed up was he by his triumph over his master's pettifoggery. Correct though he was, there was a second part to the lesson - that even though there was no such thing as magic, there was such a thing as the Spell of Batrachification.
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TLDR; D&D (by which I mean OD&D, BX and AD&D derivatives) already does this. Some spells use words, some use gestures, some use components, some use a combination of the three. Some last all day, some are over in a flash. Some have weird esoteric little exceptions and caveats, like needing to use a powdered luckstone - a magic item in its own right! - as a spell component to get the best results out of an Identify spell. There is no true systemisation of magic in D&D, and it's better that way.
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