Page:On the Magnet - Gilbert (1900 translation of 1600 work).djvu/86

 whence it might seek auxiliary forces, are the ravings of a babbling old woman, not the inventions of a distinguished mage. Others have lit upon sympathy as the cause. There may be fellow-feeling, and yet the cause is not fellow-feeling; for no passion can rightly be said to be an efficient cause. Others hold likeness of substance, many others insensible rays as the cause; men who also in very many cases often wretchedly misuse rays, which were first introduced in the natural sciences by the mathematicians. More eruditely does Scaliger say that the iron moves toward the loadstone as if toward its parent, by whose secret principles it may be perfected, just as the earth toward its centre. The Divine Thomas does not differ much from him, when in the 7th book of his Physica he discusses the reasons of motions. "In another way," he says, "it may be said to attract a thing, because it moves it to itself by altering it in some way, from which alteration it happens that when altered it moves according to its position, and in this manner the loadstone is said to attract iron. For as the parent moves things whether heavy or light, in as far as it gives them a form, by means of which they are moved to their place; so also the loadstone gives a certain quality to the iron, in accordance with which it moves towards it." This by no means ill-conceived opinion this most learned man shortly afterwards endeavoured to confirm by things which had obtained little credence respecting the loadstone and the adverse forces of garlick. Cardinal Cusan also is not to be despised. "Iron has," he says, "in the loadstone a certain principle of its own effluence; and whilst the loadstone by its own presence excites the heavy and ponderous iron, the iron is borne by a wonderful yearning, even above the motion of nature (by which in accordance with its weight it ought to tend downwards) and moves upwards, in uniting itself with its own principle. For if there were not in the iron a certain natural foretaste of the loadstone itself, it would not move to the loadstone any more than to any other stone; and unless there were in the stone a greater inclination for iron than for copper, there would not be that attraction." Such are the opinions expressed about the loadstone attracting (or the general sense of each), all dubious and untrustworthy. But those causes of the magnetical motions, which in the schools of the Philosophers are referred to the four elements and the prime qualities, we relinquish to the moths and the worms.