William Gilbert

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Commentary on Gilbert

Francis Bacon never accepted Copernican heliocentrism, and was critical of Gilbert's philosophical work in support of the diurnal motion of Earth. Bacon's criticism includes the following two statements. The first was repeated in three of his works, namely In the Advancement of Learning (1605), Novum Organum (1620), and De Augmentis (1623). The more severe second statement is from History of Heavy and Light Bodies published after Bacon's death.

The Alchemists have made a philosophy out of a few experiments of the furnace and Gilbert our countryman hath made a philosophy out of observations of the lodestone.

[Gilbert] has himself become a magnet; that is, he has ascribed too many things to that force and built a ship out of a shell.

Thomas Thomson writes in his History of the Royal Society (1812):

The magnetic laws were first generalized and explained by Dr. Gilbert, whose book on magnetism published in 1600, is one of the finest examples of inductive philosophy that has ever been presented to the world. It is the more remarkable, because it preceded the Novum Organum of Bacon, in which the inductive method of philosophizing was first explained.

William Whewell writes in his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837/1859):

Gilbert... repeatedly asserts the paramount value of experiments. He himself, no doubt, acted up to his own precepts; for his work contains all the fundamental facts of the science [of magnetism], so fully examined, indeed, that even at this day we have little to add to them.

Historian Henry Hallam wrote of Gilbert in his Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (1848):

The year 1600 was the first in which England produced a remarkable work in physical science; but this was one sufficient to raise a lasting reputation to its author. Gilbert, a physician, in his Latin treatise on the magnet, not only collected all the knowledge which others had possessed on that subject, but became at once the father of experimental philosophy in this island, and by a singular felicity and acuteness of genius, the founder of theories which have been revived after the lapse of ages, and are almost universally received into the creed of the science. The magnetism of the earth itself, his own original hypothesis, nova illa nostra et inaudita de tellure sententia [our new and unprecedented view of the planet]... was by no means one of those vague conjectures that are sometimes unduly applauded... He relied on the analogy of terrestrial phenomena to those exhibited by what he calls a terrella, or artificial spherical magnet. ...Gilbert was also one of our earliest Copernicans, at least as to the rotation of the earth; and with his usual sagacity inferred, before the invention of the telescope, that there are a multitude of fixed stars beyond the reach of our vision.

Walter William Bryant of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, wrote in his book Kepler (1920):

When Gilbert of Colchester, in his “New Philosophy,” founded on his researches in magnetism, was dealing with tides, he did not suggest that the moon attracted the water, but that “subterranean spirits and humors, rising in sympathy with the moon, cause the sea also to rise and flow to the shores and up rivers”. It appears that an idea, presented in some such way as this, was more readily received than a plain statement. This so-called philosophical method was, in fact, very generally applied, and Kepler, who shared Galileo’s admiration for Gilbert’s work, adopted it in his own attempt to extend the idea of magnetic attraction to the planets.

William Gilbert

William Gilbert

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