rmony when they are assembled in a certain pattern and so they move
accordingly.

[192] M. p. 111.

[193] M: p. 112.

[194] See, however, M: pp. 112, 113.

As to the nature of the primary form itself, Gilbert agreed with
Thales that it is like a soul,[195] "for the power of self-movement
seems to betoken a soul."[196] With Galen and St. Thomas he placed the
form of the loadstone superior to that of inanimate matter.[197] In a
sense, Gilbert even made it superior to organic matter, for it is
incapable of error.[198] Like the soul, the primary form cannot be
fragmented; when a loadstone is divided, one does not separate the
poles but each part acquires its own poles and an equator.

[195] M: pp. 109, 312.

[196] M: p. 109.

[197] M: p. 309.

[198] M: pp. 311-312.

Like the soul, fire does not destroy it.[199] Like the soul of astral
bodies, and of the earth itself, it produces complex but regular
motions; the motion of two loadstones on water offers such an
example.[200] Like the soul of a newborn child, whose nature depends
on the configuration of the heavens, the properties in the newly
awakened iron depend upon its position in the "orbis virtutis."[201]

Whence Gilbert declared:

... the earth's magnetic force and the animate form of the
globes, that are without senses, but without error ... exert
an unending action, quick, definite, constant, directive,
motive, imperant, harmonious through the whole mass of
matter; thereby are the generation and the ultimate decay of
all things on the superficies propagated.[202] The bodies of
the globes ... to the end that they might be in themselves,
and in their nature endure, had need of souls to be conjoined
to them, for else there were neither life, nor prime act, nor
movement, nor unition, nor order, nor coherence, nor
_conactus_, nor _sympathia_, nor any generation nor
alteration of seasons, and no propagation; but all were in
confusion....[203] Wherefore, not with reason, Thales ...
declares the loadstone to be animate, a part of the animate
mother earth and her beloved offspring.[204]

Gilbert ended book 5 of his treatise on the magnet with a persuasive
plea for his magnetic philosophy of the cosmos, yet his conceptual
scheme was not too successful an induction in the eyes of his
contemporaries. In particular the man from whom the Royal Society took
the inspiration for t