70 FABLE OF CUPID. 



more powerful, intrinsic, and subtle alterations and reduc 

 tions. But more will be said on this subject when we come 

 to treat of the method of reduction. But in the meanwhile 

 Telesius is fully occupied, and is strangely put to it to ac 

 count for the method of the divorce and separation of their 

 primary connatural qualities, heat, light, tenuity, and mo 

 bility, and the four opposite qualities, as they happen to be 

 in bodies : since some bodies are found to be warm or ad 

 mirably prepared to receive warmth, and yet to be at the 

 same time dense, motionless, and dark ; others are found 

 to be subtle, mobile, lucid, or white, and yet cold ; and so 

 of the rest, one certain quality to wit existing in some 

 things, whilst the remaining qualities are not in accordance 

 with it ; but others participate in two of these natures, but 

 are without other two, by a very singular exchange and 

 intercourse. And this part Telesius does not skilfully ma 

 nage, but carries himself like his opponents; who .making 

 their conjectures before their experiments, when they come 

 to the particular subjects themselves, abuse their talents 

 and their subjects, and wretchedly pervert both, and are 

 yet admirably dexterous and successful (if you believe their 

 own words), in whatever way they explain themselves. 

 But he concludes the subject in despair, intimating that 

 although the quantity and copiousness of heat and the 

 arrangement of the matter can be marked out in a vague 

 manner and in the mass, that yet their accurate and exact 

 proportions and their distinct measures are out of the reach 

 of human inquiry : yet so that (by what manner is placed 

 among the things that cannot be settled) the diversity of 

 the disposition of matter can be better known than the 

 strength and degrees of heat, and that yet in these very 

 things is placed (if any where) the highest point of human 

 knowledge and power. But after a plain acknowledgment 

 of despair, he still goes further than mere wishes and 

 prayers for more certainty. For so he said ; &quot; What heat 

 moreover or quantity, that is, what strength of heat, and 

 what quantity of it, that is which turns, and how it turns 

 the earth, and those things that are entities into such 

 bodies as itself, is not to be inquired into, since we have 

 no means of coming to this knowledge. For on what 

 principle shall it be allowed us to distribute the strength 

 of heat, and heat itself as it were into degrees, or to per 

 ceive clearly the copiousness and quantity of matter which 

 is endowed with it, and to assign a certain quantity, dis 

 position, and certain actions of matter to certain and deter- 



