78 FABLE OF CUPID. 



nizes a certain and defined bulk of matter, is blind to that 

 influence which should defend itself and preserve itself in 

 its several parts, and (as it were be clouded in the darkest 

 shades of the Peripatetics) puts that in the place of an 

 accessory, when it is mainly the principal, poising its own 

 body, removing another, solid and adamantine in itself, 

 and whence emanate by an inviolable authority the de 

 crees of the possible and the impossible. In the same 

 manner the vulgar school puerilely catches at it with an 

 easy grasp of words, imagining that the judgment is satis 

 fied by making a canon of the impossibility of two bodies 

 occupying the same space, but does not take into actual and 

 full consideration that influence and the measure of which 

 we speak ; overlooking how much depends upon it and 

 how great a light would thence be thrown upon science. 

 But to our point, that influence, whatever is its nature, is 

 not comprehended in the elements of Telesius. We must 

 now pass to that influence itself, which is as it were the 

 antistrophe to this former, that namely which preserves 

 the connexion of matter. For as matter will not suffer 

 itself to be overwhelmed and perish by matter, so neither 

 can it be separated from matter. And yet it is very 

 doubtful whether this law of nature is equally peremptory 

 with that other. 



But Telesius like Democritus supposed a vacuum heaped 

 together and unbounded, that each ens singly might lay 

 down its contiguous ens, and sometimes desert it involun 

 tarily and with difficulty (as they say), but with a greater 

 and a subdued violence, and he endeavoured to demon 

 strate this by sundry experiments, adducing especially 

 those things which are cited here and there for the deny 

 ing and refuting of a vacuum, and drawing out and en 

 larging these in such a manner as that the ens may appear 

 to keep that contiguity by being placed in a certain light 

 necessity ; but that if they were very much agitated they 

 would admit a vacuum ; as in water-hourglasses, in which 

 if there be rather a small aperture through which the water 

 can descend, they will want a spiracle for the water to 

 descend ; but if a larger foramen even without a spiracle, 

 the water being incumbent with a greater bulk on the 

 foramen, and in no way impeding the vacuum above, is 

 carried downwards. So in bellows, in which if you com 

 press and shut them so that there be left no place for the 

 air to glide in, and you afterward elevate and expand them, 

 if the skin of the bellows be slight and weak, it will break, 



