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 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 ...