Then for physics,that is,the knowledge of the subordinate and secondary causes of natural events,they render none at all but empty words.If you desire to know why some kind of bodies sink naturally downwards toward the earth,and others go naturally from it,the Schools will tell you,out of Aristotle,that the bodies that sink downwards are heavy;and that this heaviness is it that causes them to descend.But if you ask what they mean by heaviness,they will define it to be an endeavour to go to the center of the earth:so that the cause why things sink downward is an endeavour to be below;which is as much as to say that bodies descend,or ascend,because they do.Or they will tell you the center of the earth is the place of rest and conservation for heavy things,and therefore they endeavour to be there:as if stones and metals had a desire,or could discern the place they would be at,as man does;or loved rest,as man does not;or that a piece of glass were less safe in the window than falling into the street.
If we would know why the same body seems greater,without adding to it,one time than another;they say,when it seems less,it is condensed;when greater,rarefied.What is that condensed and rarefied?Condensed is when there is in the very same matter less quantity than before;and rarefied,when more.As if there could be matter that had not some determined quantity;when quantity is nothing else but the determination of matter;that is to say,of body,by which we say one body is greater or lesser than another by thus,or thus much.Or as if a body were made without any quantity at all,and that afterwards more or less were put into it,according as it is intended the body should be more or less dense.
For the cause of the soul of man,they say,creatur infundendo and creando infunditur:that is,"It is created by pouring it in,"and "poured in by creation."For the cause of sense,an ubiquity of species;that is,of the shows or apparitions of objects;which when they be apparitions to the eye is sight;when to the ear,hearing;to the palate,taste;to the nostril,smelling;and to the rest of the body,feeling.
For cause of the will to do any particular action,which is called volitio,they assign the faculty,that is to say,the capacity in general,that men have to will sometimes one thing,sometimes another,which is called voluntas;making the power the cause of the act:as if one should assign for cause of the good or evil acts of men their ability to do them.
And in many occasions they put for cause of natural events,their own ignorance,but disguised in other words:as when they say,fortune is the cause of things contingent;that is,of things whereof they know no cause:and as when they attribute many effects to occult qualities;that is,qualities not known to them,and therefore also,as they think,to no man else:and to sympathy,antipathy,antiperistasis,specifical qualities,and other like terms,which signify neither the agent that produceth them,nor the operation by which they are produced.
If such metaphysics and physics as this be not vain philosophy,there was never any;nor needed St.Paul to give us warning to avoid it.
And for their moral and civil philosophy,it hath the same or greater absurdities.If a man do an action of injustice,that is to say,an action contrary to the law,God,they say,is the prime cause of the law and also the prime cause of that and all other actions;but no cause at all of the injustice;which is the inconformity of the action to the law.This is vain philosophy.Aman might as well say that one man maketh both a straight line and a crooked,and another maketh their incongruity.And such is the philosophy of all men that resolve of their conclusions before they know their premises,pretending to comprehend that which is incomprehensible;and of attributes of honour to make attributes of nature;as this distinction was made to maintain the doctrine of free will,that is,of a will of man not subject to the will of God.
Aristotle and other heathen philosophers define good and evil by the appetite of men;and well enough,as long as we consider them governed every one by his own law:for in the condition of men that have no other law but their own appetites,there can be no general rule of good and evil actions.But in a Commonwealth this measure is false:
not the appetite of private men,but the law,which is the will and appetite of the state,is the measure.And yet is this doctrine still practised,and men judge the goodness or wickedness of their own and of other men's actions,and of the actions of the Commonwealth itself,by their own passions;and no man calleth good or evil but that which is so in his own eyes,without any regard at all to the public laws;except only monks and friars,that are bound by vow to that simple obedience to their superior to which every subject ought to think himself bound by the law of nature to the civil sovereign.
And this private measure of good is a doctrine,not only vain,but also pernicious to the public state.