* Phgayer THE SECOND BOOK. 119 
improficience in the sciences themselves. For the hand- 
ling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical in- 
quiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry . 
of all real and physical causes, and given men the occa- 
sion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, 
to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery. 
For this I find done not only by Plato, who ever anchor- 
eth upon that shore, but by Aristotle, Galen, and others 
which do usually likewise fall upon these flats of discours- 
ing causes. For to say that she hairs of the eye-lids are for 
a quicksel and fence about the sight ; or that the firmness of 
the skins and hides of living creatures is to defend them from 
the extremities of heat or cold ; or that the bones are for the 
columns or beams, whereupon the frames of the bodies of living 
creatures are built: or that the leaves of trees are for pro- 
tecling of the fruit; or that the clouds are for watering of 
the earth ; or that the solidness of the earth ts for the station 
and mansion of living creatures, and the like, is well in- 
quired and collected in metaphysic, but in physic they 
are impertinent. Nay, they are indeed but remoraes and 
hindrances to stay and slug the ship from further sailing ; 
and have brought this to pass, that the search of the 
physical causes hath been neglected and passed in silence. 
And therefore the natural philosophy of Democritus and 
some others, who did not suppose a mind or reason in 
the frame of things, but attributed the form thereof able 
to maintain itself to infinite essays or proofs of nature, 
which they term fortune, seemeth to me (as far as I can 
judge by the recital and fragments which remain unto us) 
in particularities of physical causes more real and better 
inquired than that of Aristotle and Plato; whereof both 
’ intermingled final causes, the one as a part of theology, 
and the other as a part of logic, which were the favourite 
— oa 
ir. 
