VII. 7 .] THE SECOND BOOK. 



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 the hairs of the eye-lids are for 

 a quickset 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 

 tecting of the fruit ; or that the clouds are for watering of 

 the earth ; or that the solidness of the earth is 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 



