36 NOVUM ORGANUM 



that if they shared in any other motion, it was owing to an 

 external moving cause, and imposed innumerable arbitrary 

 distinctions upon the nature of things; being everywhere 

 more anxious as to definitions in teaching and the accuracy 

 of the wording of his propositions, than the internal truth 

 of things. And this is best shown by a comparison of his 

 philosophy with the others of greatest repute among the 

 Greeks. For the similar parts of Anaxagoras, the atoms 

 of Leucippus and Democritus, the heaven and earth of Par- 

 menides, the discord and concord of Empedocles,&quot; the reso 

 lution of bodies into the common nature of fire, and their 

 condensation according to Heraclitus, exhibit some sprink 

 ling of natural philosophy, the nature of things, and experi 

 ment; while Aristotle s physics are mere logical terms, and 

 he remodelled the same subject in his metaphysics under a 

 more imposing title, and more as a realist than a nominalist. 

 Nor is much stress to be laid on his frequent recourse to ex 

 periment in his books on animals, his problems, and other 

 treatises; for he had already decided, without having prop 

 erly consulted experience as the basis of his decisions and 

 axioms, and after having so decided, he drags experiment 

 along as a captive constrained to accommodate herself to his 

 decisions: so that he is even more to be blamed than his 

 modern followers (of the scholastic school) who have de 

 serted her altogether. 



** Empedocles, of Agrigentum, flourished 444 B.C. He was the disciple of 

 Telanges the Pythagorean, and warmly adopted the doctrine of transmigration. 

 He resolved the universe into the four ordinary elements, the principles of 

 whose composition were life and happiness, or concord and amity, but whose 

 decomposition brought forth death and evil, or discord and hatred. Heraclitus 

 held matter to be indifferent to any peculiar form, but as it became rarer or 

 more dense, it took the appearance of fire, air, earth and water. Fire, how 

 ever, he believed to be the elementary principle out of which the others were 

 evolved. This was also the belief of Lucretius. See book i. 783, etc. 



