every magnet attracts the south-seeking pole of every other magnet, and repels its north-seeking pole.
Descartes attempted[1] to account for magnetic phenomena by his theory of vortices. A vortex of fluid matter was postulated round each magnet, the matter of the vortex entering by one pole and leaving by the other : this matter was supposed to act on iron and steel by virtue of a special resistance to its motion afforded by the molecules of those substances.
Crude though the Cartesian system was in this and many other features, there is no doubt that by presenting definite conceptions of molecular activity, and applying them to so wide a range of phenomena, it stimulated the spirit of inquiry, and prepared the way for the more accurate theories that came after. In its own day it met with great acceptance: the confusion which had resulted from the destruction of the old order was now, as it seemed, ended by a reconstruction of knowledge in a system at once credible and complete. Nor did its influence quickly wane; for even at Cambridge it was studied long after Newton had published his theory of gravitation;[2] and in the middle of the eighteenth century Euler and two of the Bernoullis based the explanation of magnetism on the hypothesis of vortices.[3]
Descartes' theory of light rapidly displaced the conceptions which had held sway in the Middle Ages. The validity of his explanation of refraction was, however, called in question by his fellow-countryman Pierre de Fermat (b. 1601, d. 1665),[4] and a controversy ensued, which was kept up by the Cartesians long after the death of their master. Fermat
- ↑ Principia, Part iv, § 133 sqq.
- ↑ Whiston has recorded that, having returned to Cambridge after his ordination in 1693, he resumed his studies there, "particularly the Mathematicks, and the Cartesian Philosophy: which was alone in Vogue with us at that Time. But it was not long before I, with immense Pains, but 19 Assistance, set myself with the utmost Zeal to the study of Sir Isaac Newton's wonderful Discoveries." - Whiston's Memoirs (1749), i, p. 36.
- ↑ Their memoirs shared a prize of the French Academy in 1713, and were printed in 1762 in the Recueil des pièces qui ont remporté les prix de l'Acad., tome v.
- ↑ Renati Descartes Epistolae, Pars tertia; Amstelodamni, 1983. The Fermat correspondence is comprised in letters xxix to xlvi.
