apeless matter, and becomes the cause of its phenomena.

Socrates and Plato conjecture that these ideas are beings separate from
matter, subsisting in the understanding and imagination of the deity,
that is, of mind.

Aristotle accepted forms and ideas; but he doth not believe them
separated from matter, or patterns of the things God has made.

Those Stoics, that are of the school of Zeno, profess that ideas are
nothing else but the conceptions of our own mind.

CHAPTER XI. OF CAUSES.

A cause is that by which anything is produced, or by which anything is
effected.

Plato gives this triple division of causes,--the material, the
efficient, and the final cause; the principal cause he judges to be the
efficient, which is the mind and intellect.

Pythagoras and Aristotle judge the first causes are incorporeal beings,
but those that are causes by accident or participation become corporeal
substances; by this means the world is corporeal.

The Stoics grant that all causes are corporeal, inasmuch as they are
physical.

CHAPTER XII. OF BODIES.

A body is that being which hath these three dimensions, breadth, depth,
and length;--or a bulk which makes a sensible resistance;--or whatsoever
of its own nature possesseth a place.

Plato saith that it is neither heavy nor light in its own nature, when
it exists in its own place; but being in the place where another should
be, then it has an inclination by which it tends to gravity or levity.

Aristotle saith that, if we simply consider things in their own nature,
the earth only is to be judged heavy, and fire light; but air and water
are on occasions heavy and at other times light.

The Stoics think that of the four elements two are light, fire and air;
two ponderous, earth and water; that which is naturally light doth by
its own nature, not by any inclination, recede from its own centre; but
that which is heavy doth by its own nature tend to its centre; for the
centre is not a heavy thing in itself.

Epicurus thinks that bodies are not limited; but the first bodies,
which are simple bodies, and all those composed of them, all acknowledge
gravity; that all atoms are moved, some perpendicularly, some obliquely;
some are carried aloft either by immediate impulse or with vibrations.

CHAPTER XIII. OF THOSE THINGS THAT ARE LEAST IN NATURE.

Empedocles, before the four elements, introduceth the most minute bodies
which resemble elements; but they did exist be