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Biography
Historical Article
Journal Article
Francis Bacon and Magnetical Cosmology.
Isis; An International Review Devoted to the History of Science and its Cultural Influences 2016 December
A short-lived but important movement in seventeenth-century English natural philosophy—which scholars call “magnetical philosophy” or “magnetical cosmology”—sought to understand gravity (both terrestrial and celestial) by analogy with magnetism. The movement was clearly inspired by William Gilbert’s De magnete (1600) and culminated with Robert Hooke’s prefiguring of the universal principle of gravitation, which he personally communicated to Isaac Newton in 1679. But the magnetical cosmology, as professed by those in the movement, differed from Gilbert’s philosophy in highly significant ways. Proponents never accepted Gilbert’s animistic account of magnets and seem tacitly to have accepted a belief in action at a distance that Gilbert himself rejected. This essay argues that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had already provided just the adaptations to Gilbert’s philosophy that the later thinkers adopted, including an important endorsement of action at a distance, and that he should be recognized as playing an important role in the movement.
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