282 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



up the new physiology of the magnet from the very 

 foundations. 



If then he plagiarizes Peregrinus, it is not the ipse dixit 

 of Peregrinus which he copies blindly, regardless of 

 whether right or wrong, but he tests the experiments of 

 Peregrinus crucially, finds them true, and, for that reason, 

 adopts them as a part of his structure. It is immaterial to 

 him who originated the experiment which he tests 

 whether himself or some one else. The great question 

 which he seeks to solve is, is the result true "Not in 

 books, but in things themselves?" he says, "look for 

 knowledge." Every experiment not merely those which 

 he first conceived, but those of any and every origin 

 "has been investigated and again and again done and 

 repeated under our eyes." 



Gilbert's philosophy, resting, as I have said, upon that 

 of Aristotle, is imbued with the distinction between Form 

 and Matter, which the Greek makes of fundamental im- 

 port in his Philosophia Prima, and diversifies with an 

 infinitude of subtleties. Borrowed by the Stagirite from 

 the familiar facts of the sensible world that matter has 

 always some shape and shape has always some matter, and 

 that we can name and reason about matter without distin- 

 guishing its shape, and equally name and reason about 

 shape without attending to the material shaped or its 

 various peculiarities the doctrine assumed the abstract 

 signification of two correlates inseparably implicated in 

 fact and reality in every concrete individual that has 

 received a substantive name, yet logically separable and 

 capable of being named and considered apart from each 

 other. Matter is the lower, inchoate conception the 

 unactual or potential. Form actualizes this into the per- 

 fect or complete, and furnishes the energizing principle. 

 Matter is a cause co-operative. Form is a cause operative. 

 Matter is to Form as brass is to the statue, wood to the 

 couch, and the body of man to the soul. 1 Form in the 



1 1 have followed in the foregoing the close analysis of the Aristotelian 



