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The Lodestone and the Understanding of Matter in Seventeenth Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Gordon Keith Chalmers
Gordon Keith Chalmers*
Affiliation:
Rockford College, Rockford, Ill
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Extract

Columbus and Galileo are usually considered the prime revolutionaries whose discoveries in the physical world brought on the spiritual revolution in modern life, but during the first full century of the modern world another discoverer was so regarded by Sir Thomas Browne. In the “experiments, grounds, and causes,” of the compass needle, he said, Dr. William Gilbert “discovered more in it than Columbus or Americus ever did by it.” Like Columbus, Gilbert made his discovery unwittingly. The navigator had been in search of Asia when he found a new continent; the doctor in seeking a reason for magnetic action led men's attention to reasoning on a new theory of Matter. Through his magnetical researches, the old logical conception of a continuous, soul-animated matter held by the conservative doctors and alchemists was discredited. The discoveries of all three, Columbus, Galileo, and Gilbert, were in many ways interrelated, and of course no single mind released the curiosities of the modern world unaided. What the scientists had to find out in their own laboratories and their own reasoning was persuasive evidence that matter is divorced from spirit, and for a time in the seventeenth century some of the fundamental hypotheses which indicated the divorce derived from magnetism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , January 1937 , pp. 75 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1937

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References

1 A Treatise of Bodies, (1644) London, 1658, p. 218.

2 Historia Naturalis, XXXVI, xxv (xvi).

3 De Sympathia et Antipathia Rerum (1546) in Opera, Venice, 1574, p. 58A recto. Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy also considers the lodestone in his discussion of the “loves and hates” of inaminate things.

4 Principia Philosophiae (1644) IV, cxxxiii.

5 A Treatise of Bodies, “The Preface,” 1658, pp. B2 redo— B2 verso.

6 Novum Organum, II, xxxvii (Spedding's translation).

7 Summa Theologica, I, 61.

8 On the Natural Faculties, I, xiv, 55 (English translation by Arthur J. Brock, The Loeb Classical Library).

9 Ibid., I, xiv, 44–45.

10 Ibid., III, xv, 206.

11 Timaeus, 80 b, c (Jowett's translation).

12 De Natura Rerum, VI, 1002-1041.

13 Ibid., VI, 1058-1061.

14 Ibid., VI, 1042-1047.

15 De Civitate Dei, XXI, iv.

16 Magnes, Carminum minorum opusculorum, XXIX.

17 Quoted by Park Benjamin in his The Intellectual Rise in Electricity, New York, 1895, p. 127.

18 Historiae Hierosolimitanae, LXXXIX, quoted by Benjamin, op. cit., p. 154.

19 Cf. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 155.

20 De Anima, 405a, 19-20.

21 This work was ascribed to Aristotle by Albertus Magnus and Vincent de Beauvais. Of the “De Lapide” Sir Thomas Browne says: “Which book, although we find in the catalogue of Laertius, yet, with Cabeus, we may rather judge it to be the work of some Arabic writer, not many years before the days of Albertus” (Works, ed. Wilkin, 1835-36, II, p. 301). The contemporary edition of “the catalogue of Laertius” contains the item: π∊ρiλlθωv ´ (De Vitis, ed. Isaac Casaubon, Geneva, 1594, p. 330).

22 Cf. Physica, VII, 3.

23 While entrenched with the forces of Charles of Anjou before Lucera in 1296 Peter wrote his famous letter; almost three centuries later it was edited and printed by Achilles Gasser: Petri Peregrini Maricurtensis de Magnete, seu rota perpetui motus libellus, Augsburg, 1558. Cf. Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 177, ff.

24 Pliny and “Scrapion the Moor” (Yuhanna Ibn Serapion Ben Ibrahim—Serapio Mauritanus) are the authorities for the older belief that the mountains are in India. It is dangerous, said Pliny, to sail near those coasts in ships fastened with iron nails! Saxo Grammaticus and, on his authority, Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsala, set them near the north pole. In order to pass them, he says, a ship must be constructed with wooden pegs (Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, Rome, 1555).

25 The Newe Attractive, containing a short discourse of the Magnes or Lodestone, and amongest other his vertues, of a newe discovered secret, and subtill propertie concernyng the Declinyng of the Needle, touched therewith, under the Plaine of the Horizon …, London, 1581. Cj. Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 217-219.

26 Cf. Boyle's Essays of the Strange Subtilty, Great Efficacy, and Determinate Nature of Effluviums, London, 1673.

27 De Magnete, I.

28 Ibid., I, xiv.

29 De Subtilitate, Paris, 1551. Quoted by Benjamin, op. cit., p. 248.

30 Cf. De Magnete, 1600, pp. 53, 56.

31 Ibid., p. 55.

22 Cf. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, II, iv; also St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II, lxxxix.

33 De Magnete, p. 66.

34 Ibid., p. 77.

35 Ibid., p. 210.

36 Sir Thomas Browne is credited with the first recorded use of the word electricity in English.

37 De Congtlatione et Conglutinatione Lapidum, translated from the Arabic by E. J. Holmyard and P. C. Mandeville, Paris, 1927, p. 41.

38 Philosophia Magnetica, 1629, pp. 41, 312-313.

39 The Anima Mundi of the Stoics was the most popular agent of physical and physiological change among doctors, alchemists, and all other practicing philosophers of the time.

40 De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis et eorum Curatione, Libri III, Verona, 1546.

41 Hypomneta Physica (1635) in Opera Omnia, Venice, 1641, Vol. I., p. 17b.

42 For a discussion of the history and meaning of the words, effluvium, effluxion, and emission, see my article, Three Terms of the Corpuscularian Philosophy, Modern Philology, XXXIII, 3, February, 1936.

43 Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laërtii, … (Appendix … Appendix altera, quae est PhilosophiaeEpicuri syntagma.), Lyons, 1649. For reference to Gilbert's observations, cf. Syntagma, III, I, iii, 5. The Syntagma is Gassendi's great work; it occupies two folios of the six-volume Opera (Lyons, 1658).

44 Cf. Kepler, De motibus stellis Mortis, Prague, 1609 and Benjamin, op. cit., p. 354.

45 Principia Philosophiae, III, lii.

46 In a letter to Henry More Descartes called the particles particulae striatal; Descartes's friend and editor translated the term, parties cannelées (Descartes to More, Egmont, April 15, 1649).

47 Principia Philosophiae, IV, cxlvii.

48 A Treatise of Bodies (1644), London, 1658, pp. 218-224.

49 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646, II, 2.

50 Works, ed. Wilkin, Vol. II, p. 418.

51 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 286.

52 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 287-288.

53 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 288.

54 Ibid., vol. II, p. 290.

55 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 312.

56 On Sir Thomas Browne's standing as a scientist cf. my article, Sir Thomas Browne, true Scientist, Osiris, II, 3, April, 1936.

57 Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 286-287.

58 Some Specimens of an Attempt to make Chemical Experiments Usefull to Illustrate the Notions of the Corpuscular Philosophy in Certain Physiological Essays, London, 1661.

59 Besides the works just noted cf. Boyle, An Essay of the Great Effects of Even Languid and Unheeded Motion, London, 1685.