GILBERT AND HIS PREDECESSORS. 28 1 



suaded, would gladly have embraced many of the new 

 things brought to light since their departure, had they 

 known of them ; and his mention of St. Thomas Aquinas, 

 (who seems to have anticipated his notions of magnetic 

 coition), as a man of god-like and lucid mind ; a tribute 

 which, by reason of its solitude, engenders the suspicion 

 that his failure to contradict it subsequently was due rather 

 to oversight than design. 



Following the general enunciation of his conception of 

 the earth's magnetism, and his repetition of the experi- 

 ments of Peregrinus, Gilbert enters upon the researches 

 which are plainly original. Then he rises to an eminence 

 so lofty, that his contemptuous criticisms of his predeces- 

 sors soon resemble the scorn of the eagle for the flights of 

 the sparrows. If then he is intolerant, it is that intoler- 

 ance which every man who sees the truth, however ob- 

 scurely, feels for others who preach error or half truth. 

 If he seems to belittle the achievements of his predecessors, 

 it is due to that instinctive tendency of the mind to con- 

 clude that that which is false in part is false in all, rather 

 than to impute to truth the greater leavening power. Con- 

 sequently, when, at the very outset of his studies, he finds 

 Cardan gravely asserting that a wound by a magnetized 

 needle is painless when he had only to prick his finger to 

 learn the opposite or Fracastorio that a lodestone will 

 attract silver, or Scaliger that the diamond will draw iron, 

 or Matthiolus that garlic cuts off magnetic attraction all 

 susceptible of easy disproof, which disproof he actually 

 makes and sees, he says, in the uneuphemistic terms 

 characteristic of his day, not that these people are mis- 

 taken, but that they wilfully falsify. After that the 

 mental process is easy. Anything proved true, he un- 

 doubtedly argued to himself, if drawn from that sink of 

 mendacity, redounds, not to the credit of the sink, but 

 of him who rakes it out. Therefore he did everything 

 anew not, as he says, for the purpose of refuting prior 

 falsehoods or overturning old delusions, but to build 



