ssors, and the wits as malicious. The contest between men
of meditation and men of experiment, is a very ancient quarrel; and
the "divine" Socrates was no friend to, and even a ridiculer of, those
very pursuits for which the Royal Society was established.[259]

In founding this infant empire of knowledge, a memorable literary war
broke out between Glanvill, the author of the treatise on "Witches,"
&c., and Stubbe, a physician, a man of great genius. It is the
privilege of genius that its controversies enter into the history of
the human mind; what is but temporary among the vulgar of mankind,
with the curious and the intelligent become monuments of lasting
interest. The present contest, though the spark of contention flew out
of a private quarrel, at length blazed into a public controversy.

The obscure individual who commenced the fray, is forgotten in the
boasted achievements of his more potent ally; he was a clergyman
named Cross, the Vicar of Great Chew, in Somersetshire, a stanch
Aristotelian.

Glanvill, a member of the Royal Society, and an enthusiast for the new
philosophy, had kindled the anger of the peripatetic, who was his
neighbour, and who had the reputation of being the invincible
disputant of his county.[260] Some, who had in vain contended with
Glanvill, now contrived to inveigle the modern philosopher into an
interview with this redoubted champion.

When Glanvill entered the house, he perceived that he was to begin an
acquaintance in a quarrel, which was not the happiest way to preserve
it. The Vicar of Great Chew sat amid his congregated admirers. The
peripatetic had promised them the annihilation of the new-fashioned
virtuoso, and, like an angry boar, had already been preluding by
whetting his tusks. Scarcely had the first cold civilities passed,
when Glanvill found himself involved in single combat with an
assailant armed with the ten categories of Aristotle. Cross, with his
_Quodam modo_, and his _Modo quodam_, with his _Ubi_ and his _Quando_,
scattered the ideas of the simple experimentalist, who, confining
himself to a simple recital of _facts_ and a description of _things_,
was referring, not to the logic of Aristotle, but to the works of
nature. The imperative Aristotelian was wielding weapons, which, says
Glanvill, "were nothing more than like those of a cudgel-player, or
fencing-master."[261]

The last blow was still reserved, when Cross asserted that Aristotle
had more opportunities to