rity only at random, and in a
sort of surprises, like music in old instruments suddenly touched into
sound by a wandering finger, among the lumber of people's houses.
Nature, "the art of God," as he says, varying a little a phrase used
also by Hobbes, in a work printed later--Nature, he seems to protest,
is only a little less magical, its processes only a little less in the
way of alchemy, than you had supposed. We feel that, as with that
disturbed age in England generally (and it is here that he, with it, is
so interesting, curious, old-world, and unlike ourselves) his supposed
experience might at any moment be broken in upon by a hundred forms of
a natural magic, only not quite so marvellous as that older sort of
magic, or alchemy, he is at so much pains to expose; and the large
promises of which, its large words too, he still regretfully enjoys.

[147] And yet the Discourse of Vulgar Errors, seeming, as it often
does, to be a serious refutation of fairy tales--arguing, for instance,
against the literal truth of the poetic statement that "The pigeon hath
no gall," and such questions as "Whether men weigh heavier dead than
alive?" being characteristic questions--is designed, with much
ambition, under its pedantic Greek title Pseudodoxia Epidemica, as a
criticism, a cathartic, an instrument for the clarifying of the
intellect. He begins from "that first error in Paradise," wondering
much at "man's deceivability in his perfection,"--"at such gross
deceit." He enters in this connexion, with a kind of poetry of
scholasticism which may interest the student of Paradise Lost, into
what we may call the intellectual and moral by-play of the situation of
the first man and woman in Paradise, with strange queries about it.
Did Adam, for instance, already know of the fall of the Angels? Did he
really believe in death, till Abel died? It is from Julius Scaliger
that he takes his motto, to the effect that the true knowledge of
things must be had from things themselves, not from books; and he seems
as seriously concerned as Bacon to dissipate the crude impressions of a
false "common sense," of false science, and a fictitious authority.
Inverting, oddly, Plato's theory that all learning is but reminiscence,
he reflects with a sigh how much of oblivion must needs be involved in
the getting of any true knowledge. "Men that [148] adore times past,
consider not that those times were once present (that is, as our own
are) and ourselve