INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 97 



namely, by which them hast broken the unity of nature. 

 Wherefore I can better endure Galen weighing his elements, 

 than thee adorning thy dreams. For the occult properties 

 of things excite him, but thee the common and promis 

 cuous qualities. Meanwhile, unhappy we, that dwell amid 

 such odious impertinences ! But how eagerly this most 

 skilful impostor inculcates the triad of principles, a fiction 

 not altogether useless, and somewhat allied to things ! Hear 

 still graver charges ! By mingling things divine with things 

 natural, profane with sacred, heresies with fables, thou 

 hast polluted (O sacrilegious impostor ! ) truth, both human 

 and religious. The light of nature (whose most sacred 

 name thou so often usurpest with impure mouth) thou hast 

 not hid, like the sophists, but extinguished. They were 

 the deserters of experience, thou the betrayer. Subjecting 

 by rule the crude and masked evidence of things to con 

 templation, and seeking the Proteuses of substances accord 

 ing to the computations of motions, thou hast endeavoured 

 to corrupt the fountains of knowledge, and to strip the 

 human mind ; and thou hast increased with new and adsci- 

 titious windings and tediousness of experiments, those to 

 which the Sophists were averse, and the Empiricks unequal; 

 so far art thou from having followed or known the repre 

 sentation of experience. And also the boastings of the Magi 

 thou hast every where done thy utmost to amplify, forcing 

 the most importunate cogitations by hope, and hope by pro 

 mises, at once the contriver and the work of imposture. 

 Among thy followers, Paracelsus, I envy thee none but 

 Petrus Severinus, a man not deserving to spend his life 

 amid such impertinences. Surely thou art much indebted 

 to him, Paracelsus, because he rendered the things which 

 thou (O adopted of asses) used to bray, harmonious and 

 pleasant, by a certain melody and modulation, and most 

 agreeable diversity of words, converting the odiousness of 

 falsehoods into the delights of fable. Yet I pardon thee, 

 Severinus, if, weary of the learning of sophists, which is not 

 only fruitless, but professedly courteth despair, thou sought- 

 est other supports for our decaying affairs. And when those 

 pretensions of Paracelsus presented themselves, commended 

 by the proclamations of ostentation, and the subterfuges of 

 obscurity, and the affinities of religion, and other adorn 

 ments, thou didst surrender thyself with a certain impulse 

 of indignation to these, not fountains of things but openings 

 of hope. Thou wouldst have acted rightly and in order, if 

 from the maxims of ingenuity thou hadst turned to the de- 



VOL. XV. H 



