ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 



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To metaphysics we assign the inquiry of formal and final 

 causes. But an opinion has prevailed, as if the essential forms, 

 or real differences of things, were absolutely undiscoverable 

 by human means ; granting, at the same time, that if they could 

 be discovered, this, of all the parts of knowledge, would be the 

 most worthy of inquiry. As to the possibility of the thing, 

 there are indolent discoverers, who seeing nothing but sea and 

 sky, absolutely deny there can be any land beyond them. But it 

 is manifest that Plato, a man of a sublime genius, who took a 

 view of everything as from a high rock, saw in his doctrine of 

 ideas, that " forms were the true object of knowledge" ; f though 

 he lost the advantage of this just opinion by contemplating and 

 grasping at forms totally abstracted from matter, and not as 

 determined in it ; whence he turned aside to theological specu- 

 lations, and therewith infected all his natural philosophy. But 

 if with diligence, seriousness, and sincerity, we turn our eyes 

 to action and use, we may find, and become acquainted with 

 those forms, the knowledge whereof will wonderfully enrich 

 and prosper human affairs. 



The forms of substances, indeed, viz. the species of creatures, 

 are so complicated and interwoven, that the inquiry into them 

 is either vain, or should be laid aside for a time, and resumed 

 after the forms of a more simple nature have been duly sifted 

 and discovered. For as it were neither easy nor useful to dis- 

 cover the form of a sound that shall make a word, since words, 

 by the composition and transpositions of letters are infinite; 

 but practicable, easy, and useful to discover the form of a sound 

 expressing a single letter, or by what collision or application 

 of the organs of the voice, it was made ; and as these forms of 

 letters being known, we are thence directly led to inquire the 

 forms of words : so, to inquire the form of an oak, a lion, gold, 

 water, or air, were at present vain ; but to inquire the form of 

 density, rarity, heat, cold, gravity, levity, and other schemes of 

 matter and motions, which, like the letters of the alphabet, are 

 few in number, yet make and support the essences and forms of 

 all substances, is what we would endeavor after, as constituting 

 and determining that part of metaphysics we are now upon. 



Nor does this hinder physics from considering the same nat- 

 ures in their fluxile causes only ; thus, if the cause of whiteness 

 in snow, or froth, were inquired into, it is judged to be a subtile 

 intermixture of air with water ; but this is far from being the 



