Inaugural Physico-Medical Dissertation on the Magnetism of the Macrocosm and Microcosm

because of a Specific Spirit exhaling copiously from itself and received in the empty bubbles of iron by a similar and consymbolic Spirit, but thickened and previously at rest, afterward, the bubbles being filled, returned again to the evacuated pores of the magnet, it draws iron to itself, and for the sake of the same foundation of the circulated Spirit, directs itself to the poles of the world. We have produced this description of the magnet, derived from its effect, not to be subjected to the Catonic stern/severe censure of Logicians and the file of strict definition, but to be examined at the Cynosure guiding star of truer Physics.

§. 7. The accurate Anatomy of the aforementioned Description exhibits to our view both the Stone itself or the defined object, and its viscera, which are contained in the scope of the definition. Here a very wide field will open itself to us, to which one would have to travel a long distance in examining the nature of the Magnet, but our concise brevity, which we pursue, commands us to stop in the fields, and to have shown from afar at least those things to which the curious mind of a beginner might be carried off. Among other things, one must go to the place of origin at the very first exit; nor will it be difficult to investigate the same, since this native is familiar in any vaults of the whole earth, where there is a copious yield of ♂ Mars/Iron, so that it has always drawn its birth from the very beginnings of the world. For which reason I judge that those who taught that this stone was once found in few places have falsely persuaded themselves. For they will testify that it was not unknown to the ancients. Unroll Albertus, Gilbert, Boetius, and others, as well as the more recent Lithographers, Digby, Kircher, etc.

§. 8. The principles of the Magnet are of highly doubtful and controversial deduction. The Effective principle, besides the universal and common one, namely God, the Author of all Nature, and the influxive power of the superior world into these inferior things, we establish, with Gassendi and Kircher, as a particular, specific, and immediate lapidific spirit, and the seminal [principle] of this species; the proximate Material [principle is] the same.