128 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



The dialectical subtlety of the problem cannot have 

 been otherwise than fascinating to the intellect skilled in 

 the casuistries of the Petit Pont, and it grappled with the 

 difficulties just as it had perhaps many a time done with 



"Whether angels in moving from place to place 

 Pass through the intermediate space " 



and emerged triumphantly. 



The similitude is undeniable ; so, likewise, the sympa- 

 thy. One lodestone resembles and sympathizes with the 

 other, even as the other does with it. Therefore, why 

 should attrahens act upon attractum any more than at- 

 tractum upon attrahens? If Sortes and Scholasticus at 

 opposite ends of a rope pull against one another with equal 

 strength, is Sortes drawn to Scholasticus or Scholasticus 

 to Sortes? Certainly not; they remain quiescent in statu 

 quo ; so do the lodestones. Q. B. D. 



Now, this is not setting up Sortes that favorite straw 

 man of the schools to be proved a stone, or a rose, or a 

 lily, or what not; nor does it demonstrate that any remark 

 of Sortes is both true and false at one and the same 

 time, nor that he knows something, yet nothing all 

 favorite quibbles of the mediaeval disputants and, there- 

 fore, what Neckam calls u vacuities": this is what a i2th 

 century mind, trying to break away from that sort of reas- 

 oning, manages to accomplish, in the effort The reason- 

 ing is wrong, of course; but it is physical reasoning, and 

 that, even if wrong, is something better than "vacuities." 



Now follows in this old treatise of an English monk 

 probably the first of all known descriptions of the mar- 

 iner* s compass. Here it is: 



"The sailors, moreover, as they sail over the sea, when 

 in cloudy weather they can no longer profit by the light of 

 the sun, or when the world is wrapped in the darkness of 

 the shades of night, and they are ignorant to what part 

 of the horizon the prow is directed, place the needle over 

 the magnet, which is whirled round in a circle, until, 



