William Gilbert Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

In the discovery of secret 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.

William Gilbert
O that the gods would bring to a miserable end such fictitious, crazy, deformed labours, with which the minds of the studious are blinded!

William Gilbert
The magnet's name the observing Grecians drew. From the magnetic region where it grew.

William Gilbert
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

William Gilbert
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.

William Gilbert
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 posses 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.

William Gilbert
Neither in any if the stars, nor in the sun, nor in the planets that are most operant in the world, can organs be distinguished 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.

William Gilbert
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.

William Gilbert
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?

William Gilbert
The magnetic force is animate, or imitates a soul; in many respects it surpasses the human soul while it is united to an organic body.

William Gilbert
The more advanced one is in the science of the loadstone, the more trust he has in the hypotheses, and the greater the progress he makes; nor will one reach anything like certitude in the magnetic philosophy, unless all, or at all events most, of its principles are known to him.

William Gilbert
Men are deplorably ignorant with respect to natural things, an modern philosophers, as though dreaming in the darkness, must be aroused and taught the uses of things, the dealing with things; they must be made to quit the sort of learning that comes only from books, and that rests only on vain arguments from probability and upon conjecture.

William Gilbert