286 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



results of them by their own logic. Unable, struggle as 

 he might, wholly to divest himself of that reverence for 

 antiquity peculiar to all the philosophical thought of his 

 time, a half-defined belief persisted in him that the spirit 

 of the Greek, notwithstanding the lapse of two thousand 

 years, was still competent in some way to define, to eluci- 

 date and to account for all that the human mind might find 

 obscure; but, despite such belief, he saw and knew, even 

 though he might not admit the knowledge to himself, that 

 it was not the intellect of Aristotle, but his own, which was 

 making for straight thought. And where he erred, it was 

 because he courted the ancient influence and ignored, even 

 if he did not fail to perceive, the plain deductions from the 

 facts before him. None the less he, first of all men, system- 

 atically replaced the great doctrine of words by the greater 

 doctrine of works. It was only when he thought it in- 

 cumbent on him to reconcile the teachings of man's books 

 and nature's books, and just in proportion as he allowed 

 the first to obscure the second, that he landed in inevitable 

 contradictions and fallacies. 



From this general and necessarily brief showing of 

 Gilbert's mode of thought, I now pass to his actual 

 experimental work and the physical discoveries resulting 

 therefrom. To record all of the facts relative to the 

 magnet which Gilbert first brought to light, and to show 

 their relation to the modern science, would involve ex- 

 planations far too extended, if not too didactic, to find 

 place here. Nor is it necessary to do so : for I am now 

 approaching the period when we may begin to trace the 

 independent development of amber-electricity as distin- 

 guished from that of magnetism, and need therefore in 

 future allude to the latter only in so far as the discoveries 

 made in it may have directly conduced to such progress. 

 And here it may be recalled that there is no necessary re- 

 lation between the advance or rise in a specific branch of 

 knowledge during a given period of time and all of the 

 discoveries pertaining thereto made within the limits of 



