THE SECOND BOOK 265 



not only by Plato, who ever anchoreth upon that shore, 

 but by Aristotle, Galen, and others, which do usually like- 

 wise fall upon these flats of discoursing causes. For to say 

 that < the hairs of the eye-lids are for a quickset and fence 

 about the sight ' ; or that * the firmness of the skins and 

 hides of living creatures is to defend them from the ex- 

 tremities of heat or cold'; or that 'the bones are for the 

 columns or beams, whereupon the frames of the bodies of 

 living creatures are built ' ; or that * the leaves of trees are 

 for protecting of the fruit ' ; or that ' the clouds are for 

 watering of the earth ' ; or that * the solidness of the earth 

 is for the station and mansion of living creatures,' and the 

 like, is well enquired and collected in Metaphysic ; but in 

 Physic they are impertinent. Nay, they are indeed but 

 remoras and hinderances to stay and slug the ship from 

 further sailing, and have brought this to pass, that the 

 search of the Physical Causes hath been neglected and passed 

 in silence. And therefore the natural philosophy of Demo- 

 critus and some others, who did not suppose a mind or 

 reason in the frame of things, but attributed the form 

 thereof able to maintain itself to infinite essays or proofs of 

 nature, which they term fortune, seemeth to me (as far as 

 I can judge by the recital and fragments which remain unto 

 us) in particularities of physical causes more real and better 

 enquired than that of Aristotle and Plato ; whereof both 

 intermingled final causes, the one as a part of theology, and 

 the other as a part of logic, which were the favourite studies 

 respectively of both those persons. Not because those final 

 causes are not true, and worthy to be enquired, being kept 

 within their own province ; but because their excursions 

 into the limits of physical causes hath bred a vastness and 

 solitude in that track. For otherwise keeping their pre- 

 cincts and borders, men are extremely deceived if they 

 think there is an enmity or repugnancy at all between them. 

 For the cause rendered, that ' the hairs about the eye-lids 

 are for the safeguard of the sight/ doth not impugn the 

 cause rendered, that * pilosity is incident to orifices of 

 moisture ' ; Muscosi fontes. Nor the cause rendered, that 

 ' the firmness of hides is for the armour of the body against 



