arranged into definitions obtained by
induction from experience, but nevertheless there was the same search
for the quiddity of the loadstone. Once one knew this nature then all
the properties of the loadstone could be understood.

[39] Hellmann, _op. cit._ (footnote 6), Norman, bk. 1, ch. 8.

[40] M: p. 14.

Gilbert described the nature of the loadstone in the terms of being
that were current with his scholarly contemporaries. This was the same
ontology that scholasticism had taught for centuries--the doctrine of
form and matter that we have already found in St. Thomas and Nicholas
of Cusa. Thus we find Richard Hooker[41] remarking that form gives
being and that "form in other creatures is a thing proportionable unto
the soul in living creatures." Francis Bacon,[42] in speaking of the
relations between causes and the kinds of philosophy, said: "Physics
is the science that deals with efficient and material causes while
Metaphysics deals with formal and final causes." John Donne[43]
expressed the problem of scholastic philosophy succinctly:

This twilight of two yeares, not past or next,
Some embleme is of me, ...
... of stuffe and forme perplext,
Whose _what_ and _where_, in disputation is ...

As we shall see, Gilbert continued in the same tradition, but his
interpretation of form and formal cause was much more anthropomorphic
than that of his predecessors.

Gilbert began his _De magnete_ by expounding the natural history of
that portion of the earth with which we are familiar.[44]

Having declared the origin and nature of the loadstone, we
hold it needful first to give the history of iron also ...
before we come to the explication of difficulties connected
with the loadstone ... we shall better understand what iron
is when we shall have developed ... what are the causes and
the matter of metals ...

His treatment of the origin of minerals and rocks agreed in the main
with that of Aristotle,[45] but he departed somewhat from the
peripatetic doctrine of the four elements of fire, air, water, and
earth.[46] Instead, he replaced them by a pair of elements.[47] (If
the rejection of the four Aristotelian elements were clearer, one
might consider this a part of his rejection of the geocentric universe
but he did not define his position sufficiently.)[48]

[41] Richard Hooker. _Of the laws of ecclesiastical polity_,
bk. 1, ch. 3, sect. 4 (_Works_, Oxford, Claren