THE SECOND BOOK 113 



jroper motions of the planets, with their eccentrics 

 and epicycles, and likewise by the theory of Copernicus, 

 wLo supposed the earth to move, and the calculations 

 are indifferently agreeable to both, so the ordinary face 

 and view of experience is many times satisfied by several 

 theories and philosophies ; whereas to find the real 

 truth requireth another manner of severity and atten 

 tion. For as Aristotle saith, that children at the first 

 will call every woman mother, but afterward they come 

 to distinguish according to truth ; so experience, if it 

 be in childhood, will call every philosophy mother, but 

 when it cometh to ripeness it will discern the true 



mother. So as in the mean time it is 

 phtioavhiti gd to see the several glosses and opinions 



upon nature, whereof it may be every one 

 in some one point hath seen clearer than his fellows, 

 therefore I wish some collection to be made painfully 

 and understandingly de antiquis philosophiis, out of all 

 the possible light which remaineth to us of them : which 

 kind of work I find deficient. But here I must give 

 warning, that it be done distinctly and severedly ; the 

 philosophies of every one throughout by themselves, 

 and not by titles packed and faggoted up together, as 

 hath been done by Plutarch. For it is the harmony 

 of a philosophy in itself which giveth it light and 

 credence ; whereas if it be singled and broken, it will 

 seem more foreign and dissonant. For as when I read 

 in Tacitus the actions of Nero or Claudius, with cir 

 cumstances of times, inducements, and occasions, I find 

 them not so strange ; but when I read them in Sue 

 tonius Tranquillus, gathered into titles and bundles 

 and not in order of time, they seem more monstrous 

 and incredible : so it is of any philosophy reported 

 entire, and dismembered by articles. Neither do I ex 

 clude opinions of latter times to be likewise represented 

 in this calendar of sects of philosophy, as that of 

 Theophrastus Paracelsus, eloquently reduced into an 

 harmony by the pen of Severinus the Dane ; and that 

 of Tilesius, and his scholar Donius, being as a pastoral 

 philosophy, full of sense, but of no great depth ; and 



