158 INTELLECTUAL GLOBE. 



but something between history and philosophy, a sort of 

 middle term. At present we shall speak and give our coun 

 sels respecting the history of the heavenly bodies, and then 

 of the others. 



CHAP. V 



Resumes the consideration of the History of the Heavenly 

 Bodies, showing what it ought to be in kind, and that the 

 legitimate ordering of the History ought to turn upon 

 three kinds of Precepts, namely, concerning the End of 

 such History, the Matter, and Mode of conducting it. 



WE would have the history of the celestial bodies simple, 

 not vitiated by arbitrary dogmas, but, as it were, suspended 

 out of the reach of the forcible grappling and presumption 

 of theories, only embracing phenomena raw and detached, 

 which had grown up so to speak blended with such dogmas; 

 finally, such a history as may set forth narratives of facts 

 exactly in the same manner as if nothing had been fixed 

 by the arts of astronomy and astrology, but only as if expe 

 riments and observations had been diligently collected and 

 perspicuously described. In which kind of history we find 

 nothing hitherto done to accord with our wish. Caius 

 Pliny attempted only something of the kind in a cursory 

 and inexact style ; but a valuable history might be ex 

 tracted and dug from the mine of Ptolemy and Copernicus, 

 and the more informed teachers of astronomy, by exhaust 

 ing all the experiments, and adding the observations of the 

 moderns. And if it should appear to any one surprising, 

 that we should throw back again what had been secured, 

 enlarged, and rectified, to its primitive barbarism, and the 

 simplicity of its crude observations, we answer thus ; with 

 none of the ostentation of the earlier inventors, we attempt 

 a far nobler work, for we think not of calculations and pre 

 dictions, but of philosophy such, we mean, as shall in 

 struct the human mind, not only with respect to the motion 

 of the higher bodies and its periods, but concerning their sub 

 stance, their various qualities, their power and influence, ac 

 cording to methods natural and admitting of no uncertainty, 

 free from the superstition and childishness of tradition; and 

 again, as respects their motion itself, to discover and unfold 

 not what is reconcileable to known phenomena, but what 

 is found on penetrating deep into nature, and is true in act 



