The Natural Philosophy of William Gilbert and His Predecessors

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                                 THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY:

                                                               PAPER 8


                                             THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF
                                  WILLIAM GILBERT AND HIS PREDECESSORS

                                                       _W. James King_




                                                      By W. James King

                      THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF
                           WILLIAM GILBERT
                         AND HIS PREDECESSORS

    Until several decades ago, the physical sciences were
    considered to have had their origins in the 17th
    century--mechanics beginning with men like Galileo Galilei
    and magnetism with men like the Elizabethan physician and
    scientist William Gilbert.

    Historians of science, however, have traced many of the 17th
    century's concepts of mechanics back into the Middle Ages.
    Here, Gilbert's explanation of the loadstone and its powers
    is compared with explanations to be found in the Middle Ages
    and earlier.

    From this comparison it appears that Gilbert can best be
    understood by considering him not so much a herald of the new
    science as a modifier of the old.

    THE AUTHOR: W. James King is curator of electricity, Museum
    of History and Technology, in the Smithsonian Institution's
    United States National Museum.


The year 1600 saw the publication by an English physician, William
Gilbert, of a book on the loadstone. Entitled _De magnete_,[1] it has
traditionally been credited with laying a foundation for the modern
science of electricity and magnetism. The following essay is an
attempt to examine the basis for such a tradition by determining what
Gilbert's original contributions to these sciences were, and to make
explicit the sense in which he may be considered as being dependent
upon earlier work. In this manner a more accurate estimate of his
position in the history of science may be made.

    [1] William Gilbert, _De magnete, magneticisque corporibus
    et de magno magnete tellure; physiologia nova, plurimis &
    argumentis, & experimentis, demonstrata_, London, 1600, 240
    pp., with an introduction by Edward Wright. All references to
    Gilbert in this article, unless otherwise noted, are to the
    American translation by P. Fleury Mottelay, 368 pp.,
    published in New York in 1893, and are designated by the
    letter M. However, the Latin text of the 1600 edition has
    been quoted wherever I have disagreed with the Mottelay
    translation.

    A good source of information on Gilbert is Dr. Duane H. D.
    Roller's doctoral thesis, written under the direction of Dr.
    I. B. Cohen of Harvard University. Dr. Roller, at present
    Curator of the De Golyer Collection at the University of
    Oklahoma, informed me that an expanded version of his
    dissertation will shortly appear in book form. Unfortunately
    his researches were not known to me until after this article
    was completed.

One criterion as to the book's significance in the history of science
can be applied almost immediately. A number of historians have pointed
to the introduction of numbers and geometry as marking a watershed
between the modern and the medieval understanding of nature. Thus
A. Koyre considers the Archimedeanization of space as one of the
necessary features of the development of modern astronomy and
physics.[2] A. N. Whitehead and E. Cassirer have turned to measurement
and the quantification of force as marking this transition.[3]
However, the obvious absence[4] of such techniques in _De magnete_
makes it difficult to consider Gilbert as a founder of modern
electricity and magnetism in this sense.

    [2] Alexandre Koyre, _Etudes galileennes_, Paris, 1939.

    [3] Alfred N. Whitehead, _Science and the modern world_, New
    York, 1925, ch. 3; Ernst Cassirer, _Das Erkenntnisproblem_,
    ed. 3, Berlin, 1922, vol. 1, pp. 314-318, 352-359.

    [4] However, see M: pp. 161, 162, 168, 335.

[Illustration: Figure 1.--WILLIAM GILBERT'S BOOK ON THE LOADSTONE,
TITLE PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION, FROM A COPY IN THE LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS. (_Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress._)]

There is another sense in which it is possible to contend that
Gilbert's treatise introduced modern studies in these fields. He has
frequently been credited with the introduction of the inductive method
based upon stubborn facts, in contrast to the methods and content of
medieval Aristotelianism.[5] No science can be based upon faulty
observations and certainly much of _De magnete_ was devoted to the
destruction of the fantastic tales and occult sympathies of the
Romans, the medieval writers, and the Renaissance.