64 ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 



Another error proceeds from too great a reverence, 

 and a kind of adoration paid to the human understand 

 ing; whence men have withdrawn themselves from the 

 contemplation of nature and experience, and sported with 

 their own reason and the fictions of fancy. These intel- 

 lectualists, though commonly taken for the most sublime 

 and divine philosophers, are censured by Heraclitus, when 

 he says, &quot;Men seek for truth in their own little worlds, and 

 not in the great world without them&quot;: 66 and as they disdain 

 to spell, they can never come to read in the volume of God s 

 works; but on the contrary, by continual thought and agi 

 tation of wit, they compel their own genius to divine and 

 V deliver oracles, whereby they are deservedly deluded. 



Another error is, that men often infect their speculations 

 and doctrines with some particular opinions they happen to 

 be fond of, or the particular sciences whereto they have most 

 applied, and thence give all other things a tincture that is 

 utterly foreign to them. Thus Plato mixed philosophy with 

 theology; 66 Aristotle with logic; Proclus with mathematics; 

 as these arts were a kind of elder and favorite children with 

 them. So the alchemists have made a philosophy from a 

 few experiments of the furnace, and Gilbert another out of 

 the loadstone: in like manner, Cicero, when reviewing the 

 opinions on the nature of the soul, coming to that of a 

 musician, who held the soul was but a harmony, he pleas 

 antly said, &quot;This man has not gone out of his art.&quot; 87 But 

 of such authors Aristotle says well: &quot;Those who take in 

 but a few considerations easily decide.&quot; 68 



65 Text Bmpir. against St. Math. vii. 133. 



66 If it is true that God is the great spring of motion in the universe, as the 

 theory of moving forces is a part of mechanics and mechanics a department of 

 physics, we cannot see how theology can be entirely divorced from natural 

 philosophy. Physicists are too apt to consider the universe as eternally exist 

 ing, without contemplating it in its finite aspect as a series of existences to be 

 produced, and controlled by the force of laws externally impressed upon them. 

 Hence their theory of moving forces is incomplete, as they do not take the 

 prime mover into account, or supply us, in case of denying him, with the 

 equivalent of his action. Ed. 



67 &quot;Hie ab arte sua non recessit.&quot; Tuscul. Quaest. i. c. 10. 



68 Arist. Do Gener. et Corrup. lib. 1. 



