e also, that if sciences of
this kind had any life in them, that could never have come to pass
which has been the case now for many ages--that they stand almost at
a stay, without receiving any augmentations worthy of the human race;
insomuch that many times not only what was asserted once is asserted
still, but what was a question once is a question still, and instead
of being resolved by discussion is only fixed and fed; and all the
tradition and succession of schools is still a succession of masters
and scholars, not of inventors and those who bring to further
perfection the things invented. In the mechanical arts we do not find
it so; they, on the contrary, as having in them some breath of life,
are continually growing and becoming more perfect. As originally
invented they are commonly rude, clumsy, and shapeless; afterwards
they acquire new powers and more commodious arrangements and
constructions; in so far that men shall sooner leave the study and
pursuit of them and turn to something else, than they arrive at the
ultimate perfection of which they are capable. Philosophy and the
intellectual sciences, on the contrary, stand like statues, worshiped
and celebrated, but not moved or advanced. Nay, they sometimes
flourish most in the hands of the first author, and afterwards
degenerate. For when men have once made over their judgments to
others' keeping, and (like those senators whom they called _Pedarii_)
have agreed to support some one person's opinion, from that time
they make no enlargement of the sciences themselves, but fall to
the servile office of embellishing certain individual authors and
increasing their retinue. And let it not be said that the sciences
have been growing gradually till they have at last reached their full
stature, and so (their course being completed) have settled in the
works of a few writers; and that there being now no room for the
invention of better, all that remains is to embellish and cultivate
those things which have been invented already. Would it were so! But
the truth is that this appropriating of the sciences has its origin in
nothing better than the confidence of a few persons and the sloth
and indolence of the rest. For after the sciences had been in several
parts perhaps cultivated and handled diligently, there has risen up
some man of bold disposition, and famous for methods and short ways
which people like, who has in appearance reduced them to an art, while
he has in fact