NOVUM OKGANUAf. 265 



less than in his will, a certain ambition, and this is especially the case 

 with piofound and lofty minds. An example of this kind is veiy 

 apparent among the Greeks, especially in Pythagoras : here, however, 

 it is combined with a more gross and burdensome superstition ; while 

 it is more dangerous and more subtle in Plato and his school. This 

 kind of mischief also appears in parts of the other Philosophies in 

 the introduction of abstract forms, final causes, and//&amp;gt;.r/ causes, in the 

 very frequent omission of middle, causes, and the like. But in this 

 matter the greatest caution must be employed, for the apotheosis of 

 error is the worst of all evils ; and it must be esteemed as the very 

 plague of the intellect when vanity comes to be worshipped. But some 

 of the moderns, however, have indulged in this folly, with such con 

 summate carelessness, as to have endeavoured to found a natural 

 philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, the book of Job, and other 

 passages of Holy Scripture seeking the dead among the living.&quot; 

 And this folly is the more to be prevented and restrained, because, 

 from the unsound admixture of things divine and human, there arises 

 not merely a phantastic philosophy, but also a heretical religion. And 

 so it is a very salutary thing, with all sobriety of mind, to render unto 

 faith those things only that are faith s. 



Ixvi. We have already spoken of the vicious authorities of philoso 

 phers which are founded either on vulgar conceptions, on a few ex 

 periments, or on superstition. We must iurthcr speak of the faulty 

 materials of contemplation, especially in Natural Philosophy. For 

 the human Intellect is affected by observing the action of the 

 mechanical arts, where bodies arc changed in the highest possible 

 degree by composition and separation, so that it thinks that some 

 similar process is going on in the universal nature of things. And 

 hence arose that fiction of elements, and of their meeting to form 

 natural bodies. Again, when man contemplates the liberty of Nature, 

 he comes upon species of things, of animals, plants, minerals, and 

 thence he easily glides into the idea that there are in Nature certain 

 primary forms of things which Nature is striving to draw out ; and 

 that all the variety proceeds either from impediments and aberrations 

 which Nature meets with in completing her task, or from the collision 

 of different species, and the transplanting of one into the other. And 

 the first idea has given birth to the first elementary qualities, the 

 second, to the occult properties and specific virtues : and each of 

 them refers to empty compendia of contemplation, with which the mind 

 rests contented, and is diverted from more solid subjects. But phy 

 sicians employ their labour to better advantage on secondary qualities 

 and operations of things, as attraction, repulsion, rarijication, conden 

 sation, astriction, discussion, maturation, and the like ; and would have 

 succeeded much better had they not, by means of these two compendia 

 which I have mentioned that is to say, elementary qualities and 

 specific virtues corrupted those of the second kind, which have been 

 the subject of true investigation, by reducing them to first qualities, 

 and their subtle and incommensurable combinations ; or else by not 

 carrying them on, with a wider and more diligent observation, to third 



