on 
di ee SMA 
128 OF THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. [VII 5. 
according to truth; so experience, if it be in childhood, 
will call every philosophy mother, but when it cometh 
to ripeness it will discern the true mother. So as in 
.., the mean time it is good to see the several 
De antiquis ae 
philosophiis, 10Sses and opinions upon nature, whereof 
it may be every one in some one point hath 
seen clearer than his fellows, therefore I wish some ,col- 
lection to be made painfully and understandingly de 
_antiquts philosophits, out of all the possible light which 
remaineth to us of them: which kind of work I find 
deficient. But here I must give warning, that it be done 
distinctly and severedly; the philosophies of every one 
throughout by themselves, and not by titles packed and 
faggoted up together, as hath been done by Plutarch. 
For it is the harmony of a philosophy in itself which 
giveth it light and credence; whereas if it be singled 
and broken, it will seem more foreign and dissonant. 
For as when I read in Tacitus the actions of Nero or 
Claudius, with circumstances of times, inducements, and 
occasions, I find them not so strange; but when I read 
them in Suetonius Tranquillus, gathered into titles and 
bundles and not in order of time, they seem more mon- 
strous and incredible: so is it of any philosophy reported 
entire, and dismembered by articles. Neither do I ex- 
clude opinions of latter times to be likewise represented 
in this kalendar of sects of philosophy, as that of Theo- 
phrastus Paracelsus, eloquently reduced into an harmony 
by the pen of Severinus the Dane; and that of Tilesius, 
and his scholar Donius, being as a pastoral philosophy, 
“full of sense, but of no great depth; and that of Fracas- 
torius, who, though he pretended not to make any new 
philosophy, yet did use the absoluteness of his own sense 
upon the old; and that of Gilbertus our countryman, who 
