AND therefore the natural philosophies of Democritus and others 

 who allow no God or mind in the frame of things, but attribute the 

 structure of the universe to infinite essays and trials of nature, or 

 what they call fate or fortune, and assigned the causes of particular 

 things to the necessity of matter without any intermixture of final 

 causes, seem, so far as we can judge from the remains of their 

 philosophy, much more solid, and to have gone deeper into nature, 

 with regard to physical causes, than the philosophy of Aristotle or 

 Plato ; and this only because they never meddled with final causes, 

 which the others were perpetually inculcating. 



BACON, Advancement of Learning. 



