artificial methods by
which it pretended to decide on all topics. Too long it had filled the
ear with airy speculation, while it starved the mind that languished
for sense and knowledge. But this emancipation menaced the power of
the followers of Aristotle, who were still slumbering in their
undisputed authority, enthroned in our Universities. For centuries
the world had been taught that the philosopher of Stagira had thought
on every subject: Aristotle was quoted as equal authority with St.
Paul, and his very image has been profanely looked on with the
reverence paid to Christ. BACON had fixed a new light in Europe, and
others were kindling their torches at his flame. When the great
usurper of the human understanding was once fairly opposed to Nature,
he betrayed too many symptoms of mere humanity. Yet this great triumph
was not obtained without severe contention; and upon the Continent
even blood has been shed in the cause of words. In our country, the
University of Cambridge was divided by a party who called themselves
_Trojans_, from their antipathy to the _Greeks_, or the Aristotelians;
and once the learned Richard Harvey, the brother of Gabriel, the
friend of Spenser, stung to madness by the predominant powers, to
their utter dismay set up their idol on the school-gates, with his
heels upwards, and ass's ears on his head. But at this later period,
when the Royal Society was established, the war was more open, and
both parties more inveterate. Now the world seemed to think, so
violent is the reaction of public opinion, that they could reason
better without Aristotle than with him: that he had often taught them
nothing more than self-evident propositions, or had promoted that
dangerous idleness of maintaining paradoxes, by quibbles and other
captious subtilties. The days had closed of the "illuminated," the
"profound," and the "irrefragable," titles, which the scholastic
heroes had obtained; and the Aristotelian four modes, by which all
things in nature must exist, of _materialiter_, _formaliter_,
_fundamentaliter_, and _eminenter_, were now considered as nothing
more than the noisy rattles, or chains of cherry-stones, which had too
long detained us in the nursery of the human mind.[253] The world had
been cheated with words instead of things; and the new experimental
philosophy insisted that men should be less loquacious, but more
laborious.

Some there were, in that unsettled state of politics and religion, in