Physicians From England

"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... was by no means one of those vague conjectures... 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."

"Lucid gems are made of water; just as Crystal, which has been concreted from clear water, not always by a very great cold, as some used to judge, and by very hard frost, but sometimes by a less severe one, the nature of the soil fashioning it, the humour or juices being shut up in definite cavities, in the way in which spars are produced in mines."

"How far away from the earth are those remotest of stars: they are beyond the reach of eye, or man's devices, or man's thought. What an absurdity is this motion (of spheres). He also argues for the extreme variability of the distance to the various heavenly bodies and states that situated "in thinnest aether, or in the most subtle fifth essence, or in vacuity - how shall the stars keep their places in the mighty swirl of these enormous spheres composed of a substance of which no one knows aught?"

"The "New Philosophy" [De Mundo Nostro Sublunari Philosophia Nova] of Gilbert came to be published half a century after his death in the following curious circumstances. Within the period of apparently some two years after his demise, William Gilbert, of Melford, his elder brother, bearing, oddly enough, the same name... found, among Gilbert's scattered papers, the fragmentary New Philosophy and the Meteorology. These (as he says, being governed by fraternal affection, as well as by an appreciation of the importance of the arguments advanced, whereof he felt unwilling to deprive the world), he arranged, caused to be translated into Latin, and prefixed to them a dedication... That he intended to publish the book is clear; nevertheless, he departed, as its author had done with his purpose unfulfilled."

"In 1626 Bacon succumbed to the results of his ill timed experiment in preserving chickens with snow... The Bacon manuscripts were sent to [Sir William] Boswell's residence at the Hague, and there lay until Boswell, who died in 1647, confided them to the editorial care of Isaac Gruter who... published them all together in 1653. Among the papers which thus came into his hands, Gruter found the two manuscripts of William Gilbert, of Colchester, which William Gilbert, of Melford, had prepared, and these he edited and issued... in 1651."

"Only on the superficies of the globes is plainly seen the host of souls and of animate existences, and their great and delightful diversity the Creator taketh pleasure"

"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."

"Gilbert shall live till loadstones cease to draw, Or British fleets the boundless ocean awe."

"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."

"In the discovery of hidden things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort."

"We, therefore, having directed our inquiry toward a cause that is manifest, sensible, and comprehended by all men, do know that the earth rotates on its own poles, proved by many magnetical demonstrations to exist. For not in virtue only of its stability and its fixed permanent position does the earth possess poles and verticity; it might have had another direction, as eastward or westward, or toward any other quarter. By the wonderful wisdom of the Creator, therefore, forces were implanted in the earth, forces primarily animate, to the end the globe might, with steadfastness, take direction, and that the poles might be opposite, so that on them, as at the extremities of an axis, the movement of diurnal rotation might be performed."

"The significant fact lies in the possession of the manuscripts by Bacon during his lifetime. He studied them, he knew their contents. And in those great Monuments wherein he has invoked for his own fame the judgment of the next age, he attacks and condemns over and over again the opinions of a man who could neither speak for himself, being in his grave, nor be spoken for by the only written words wherein he had set them forth, and which in the cabinet of my Lord Verulam, were as effectually silenced and entombed."

"The electric effluvia differ much from air, and as air is the earth's effluvium, so electric bodies have their own distinctive effluvia; and each peculiar effluvium has its own individual power of leading to union, its own movement to its origin, to its fount, and to the body emitting the effluvium."

"Neither in any if the stars, nor in the sun, nor in the planets that are most operant in the world, can organs be disntinguished or imagined by us; nevertheless, they live and endow with life small bodies at the earth's elevated points. If there is aught of which man may boast, that of a surety is soul, is mind; and the other animals, too, are ennobled by soul; even God, by whose rod all things are governed, is soul."

"The famous treatise which opened the modern era by treating magnetism and electricity on a scientific basis appeared just 300 years ago. The author, William Gilbert, M.D., of Colchester... was an exact and diligent explorer, first of chemical and then of magnetic and electric phenomena. ...Working nearly a century before the time when the astronomical discoveries of Newton had originated the idea of attraction at a distance, he established a complete formulation of the interaction of magnets by what we now call the exploration of their fields of force. His analysis of the facts of magnetic influence, and incidentally of the points in which it differs from electric influence, is virtually the one which Faraday reintroduced. A cardinal advance was achieved, at a time when the Copernican Astronomy had still largely to make its way, by assigning the behavior of the compass and the dip needle to the fact that the earth itself is a great magnet, by whose field of influence they are controlled. His book passed through many editions on the Continent within forty years; it won the high praise of Galileo. Gilbert has been called the 'father of modern electricity' by Priestley, and 'the Galileo of magnetism' by Poggendorff."

"Natural knowledge has not forgone emotion. It has simply taken for itself new ground of emotion, under impulsion from and in sacrifice to that one of its 'values', Truth."

"Science is the fruit of patient toil, sifting out facts and in search of more facts. It has no tilt against religion as such. It knows its own field to be vast, but also knows it limited."

"A vast number, perhaps the numerical majority, of animal forms cannot be shown unequivocally to possess mind."

"Mind, for anything perception can compass, goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a 'thing'. It remains without sensual confirmation, and remains without it for ever. All that counts in life. Desire, zest, truth, love, knowledge, 'values', and, seeking metaphor to eke out expression, hell's depth and heaven's utmost height. Naked mind."

"The influence of mind on the doings of life makes mind an effective contribution to life. We can seize then how mind counts and has counted. That it has been evolved seems to assure us that it has counted. How it has counted would seem to be that the finite mind has influenced its individual's 'doing'. Lloyd Morgan, the biologist, urged that, 'the primary aim, object, and purpose of consciousness is control'. Dame Nature seems to have taken the like view."

"Today Nature looms larger than ever and includes more fully than ever ourselves. It is, if you will, a machine, but it is a partly mentalized machine, and in virtue of including ourselves it is a machine with human qualities of mind. It is a running stream of energy—mental and physical—and unlike man-made machines it is actuated by emotions, fears and hopes, dislikes and love. It bids fair to be master of this our planet—'it looks before and after'. To what or to whom does it owe this eminent and seemingly unique status? It answers unhesitatingly that it owes it to itself. But to the semi-divine assembly which looks on, that answer would be impertinent but for its saving ignorance. We may suppose that if they hear it the stars smile. Human thought is left wondering. What is it all for? Man is too small and too perishable to be the object of this whole. A counsel is 'let us endure and be quiet'—a counsel which is the easier to follow because it seems all that there is for us to do, at least at the present moment."

"Natural science is a branch of knowledge by general consent not primarily based on the a priori. It […] observes and endeavours by observation to follow and trace the 'how' of what happens in Nature. It proceeds further to generalize about this 'how'. It tries to decipher something of it in the past and to forecast something of it in the future. Above all it expends its utmost pains on attempting to describe the 'how' fully and accurately by first-hand observation at this present."

"The scientific journey has no end. It has only halting places—points at which the traveller can look round and survey."

"[M]an's life of all lives is the most completely and fully bound to earth because life's experience, wholly earthly, is in man's case the most complete and full. […] Man is the most, not the least, earthly of all creatures."

"And the pursuit whose quest is Nature's understanding, has this among its rewards, that as it progresses its truth is testable. Truth is a 'value'. The quest itself is therefore in a measure its own satisfaction. We receive the lesson that our advance to knowledge is of asymptotic type, even as continually approaching so continually without arrival. The satisfaction shall therefore be eternal."

"It is difficult to get a hearing from busy men for even a great new truth."

"The 'motion' of an energy-system is its 'behaviour'. Various types of organization of system produce on that basis various types of behaviour. A grey rock, said Ruskin, is a good sitter. That is one type of behaviour. A darting dragon-fly is another type of behaviour. We call the one alive, the other not. But both are fundamentally balances of give and take of motion with their surround. To make 'life' a distinction between them is at root to treat them both artificially."

"The gap between 'the State' and 'a machine' is not so wide."

"In the great head-end which has been mostly darkness springs up myriads of twinkling stationary lights and myriads of trains of moving lights of many different directions. It is as though activity from one of those local places which continued restless in the darkened main-mass suddenly spread far and wide and invaded all. The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns. Now as the waking body rouses, subpatterns of this great harmony of activity stretch down into the unlit tracks of the stalk-piece of the scheme. Strings of flashing and travelling sparks engage the lengths of it. This means that the body is up and rises to meet its waking day."

"In the training and in the exercise of medicine a remoteness abides between the field of neurology and that of mental health, psychiatry. It is sometimes blamed to prejudice on the part of the one side or the other. It is both more grave and less grave than that. It has a reasonable basis. It is rooted in the energy-mind problem. Physiology has not enough to offer about the brain in relation to the mind to lend the psychiatrist much help."

"[A]s followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space."

"Biology cannot go far in its subject before being met by mind."

"The brain is a mystery—it has been—and still will be. Not that we do not know many facts about it. The facts we know have indeed greatly multiplied in recent years, but they all fail to give us a key to the mystery of how it creates—if it does create—our thoughts and feelings; that is, said more concisely though less concretely, our mind."

"We run, not only because we think it is doing us good, but … because it helps us to do other things better."

"How great his theft, who robs himself!"

"Hold the fleet angel fast until he bless thee."

"'Tis the last act which crowns the play."

"Thus hand in hand through life we'll go; Its checker'd paths of joy and woe With cautious steps we'll tread"

"To be resign'd when ills betide, Patient when favours are deni'd, And pleas'd with favours given,— Dear Chloe, this is wisdom's part; This is that incense of the heart Whose fragrance smells to heaven."

"Yet still we hug the dear deceit."

"If solid happiness we prize, Within our breast this jewel lies, And they are fools who roam. The world has nothing to bestow; From our own selves our joys must flow, And that dear hut, our home."

"A fellow in a market town, Most musical, cried razors up and down."

"Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt, And every grin so merry draws one out."

"People may have too much of a good thing: Full as an egg of wisdom thus I sing."

"What rage for fame attends both great and small! Better be damned than mentioned not at all."

"No, let the monarch’s bags and others hold The flattering, mighty, nay, al-mighty gold."

"Rustic herald of the spring."

"Such and so various are the tastes of men!"

"Adieu, for him, The dull engagements of the bustling world! Adieu the sick impertinence of praise! And hope, and action! for with her alone, By streams and shades, to steal these sighing hours, Is all he asks, and all that fate can give!"

"The Providence of heaven Has some peculiar blessing given To each allotted state below."