BOOK L] APHORISMS. 437 



that peculiar abstract; opinions on nature and the principles of 

 things are of much importance to men s fortunes, since it were 

 easy to revive many ancient theories, and to introduce many new 

 ones ; as for instance, many hypotheses with regard to the 

 heavens can be formed, differing in themselves, and yet suffi 

 ciently according with the phenomena. 



We bestow not our labour on such theoretical, and, at the 

 game time, useless topics. On the contrary, our determination 

 is that of trying, whether we can lay a firmer foundation, and 

 extend to a greater distance the boundaries of human power and 

 dignity. And although here and there, upon some particular 



rints, we hold (in our own opinion) more true and certain, and 

 might even say, more advantageous tenets than those in 

 general repute (which we have collected in the fifth part of our 

 Instauration), yet we offer no universal or complete theory. The 

 time does not yet appear to us to be arrived, and we entertain no 

 hope of our life being prolonged to the completion of the sixth 

 part of the instauration (which is destined for philosophy dis 

 covered by the interpretation of nature), but are content if we 

 proceed quietly and usefully in our intermediate pursuit, scatter 

 ing, in the mean time, the seeds of less adulterated truth for 

 posterity, and, at least, commence the great work. 



nature of the bodies contained in it, are not to be investigated by rea 

 soning, which was done by the ancients, but are to be apprehended by 

 the senses, and collected from the things themselves.&quot; He had, how 

 ever, no sooner laid down this principle than he departed from it in 

 practice, and pursued the deductive method he so much condemned in his 

 predecessors. His first step was an assumption of principles as arbitrary 

 as any of the empirical notions of antiquity ; at the outset of his book he 

 very quietly takes it for granted that heat is the principle of motion, 

 cold of immobility, matter being assumed as the corporeal substratum, 

 in which these incorporeal and active agents carry on their operations. 

 Out of these abstract and ill-defined conceptions Telesius builds up a 

 system quite as complete, symmetrical, and imaginative as any of the 

 structures of antiquity. 



Francis Patricius, born at Cherso, in Dalmatia, about 1529, was 

 another physicist who rose up against Aristotle, and announced the dawn 

 of a new philosophy. In &quot;1593 appeared his &quot; Nova de Universis Philoso- 

 phia.&quot; He lays down a string of axioms, in which scholastic notions, 

 phvsical discoveries, and theological dogmas, are strangely commingled, 

 and erects upon them a system which represents all the grotesque 

 features of theological empiricism. 



Severinus, born in Jutland, in 1529, published an attack on Aristotle s 

 natural history, but adopted fantasies which the Stagyrite ridiculed in 

 his own day. He was a follower of Paracelsus, a Swiss enthusiast of 

 the fifteenth century, who ignored the ancient doctrine of the four 

 elements for salt, sulphur, and mercury, and allied chemistry and medi 

 cine with mysticism. Ed. 



