is interesting that Cusa
held that the loadstone has an inclination to iron, as well
as the converse!

[37] Cusa, _Cusa Schriften_, vol. 8, _De pace fidei_,
translated by L. Mohler, Leipzig, 1943, ch. 12, p. 127.

[38] Cusa, _Exercitationes_, ch. 7, 563 and 566, quoted in,
F. A. Scharpff, _Des Cardinals und Bischofs Nicolaus Von Cusa
Wichtigste Schriften in Deutscher Uebersetzung_, Freiburg,
1862, p. 435. See also Martin Billinger, _Das Philosophische
in Den Excitationen Des Nicolaus Von Cues_, Heidelberg, 1938,
and _Cusa Schriften_ (see footnote 37), vol. 8, p. 209, note
105. Gilbert (M: p. 223) called the compass "the finger of
God."

The Elizabethan Englishman Robert Norman also turned to the Deity to
explain the wonderful effects of the loadstone.[39]

Now therefore ... divers have whetted their wits, yea, and
dulled them, as I have mine, and yet in the end have been
constrained to fly to the cornerstone: I mean God: who ...
hath given Virtue and power to this Stone ... to show one
certain point, by his own nature and appetite ... and by the
same vertue, the Needle is turned upon his own Center, I mean
the Center of his Circular and invisible Vertue ... And
surely I am of opinion, that if this would be found in a
Sphericall form, extending round about the Stone in Great
Compass, and the dead body Stone in the middle therof: Whose
center is the center of his aforesaid Vertue. And this I have
partly proved, and made visible to be seen in the same
manner, and God sparing me life, I will herein make further
Experience.

Again, one can infer that the heavens impart a guiding principle
to the iron which acts under the influence of this Superior Cause.

One of the points made in St. Thomas' argument on motion due to the
loadstone was that there is a limit to the "virtus" of the loadstone,
but he did not specify the nature of it. Norman refined the Thomist
concept of a bound by making it spherical in form, foreshadowing
Gilbert's "orbis virtutis."

Gilbert's philosophy of nature does not move far from scholastic
philosophy, except away from it in logical consistency. As the concern
of Aristotle and of St. Thomas was to understand being and change by
determining the nature of things, so Gilbert sought to write a logos
of the physis, or nature, of the loadstone--a physiology.[40] This
physiology was not formally