IV. These and many other such-like portentous particulars, did Idearia teach to, and impose on her credulous disciples; who all received and embraced them as infallible truths; but at length there arose in the very school of the doctress herself, a contentious schism, or scandalous disagreement, which was begun by one Papyratius, a man of subtil and animated genius, but a great lover of novelties. This man introduced new and not less astonishing dogmas than the others; such as that all the living creatures in the world, man only excepted, have no more sensation or feeling than stocks or stones; and that in every man, there is but a very small portion of the body which possesses the presence of the soul; that the extension of the world is infinite; that the motion of sublunary bodies, is equally semper-eternal with that of the cœlestial ones; that the imaginary space, is really and truly a body; that every thing upon the face of the earth, is in so continual and rapid a motion, as in the space of every twenty-four hours, to travel some thousands of leagues; that we in all things, should give credit to our imaginations, but none to our senses; for that the representations made by these last, are apt grossly to deceive us; and that neither is the swan white, or the crow black, nor is fire hot, or snow cold, &c. V. These novelties, and others of the same sort, although they were condemned from the beginning by the majority of Idearia’s disciples, did not fail to attract a number of votaries, sufficient to form a new school. The two parties inveighed against each other with great bitterness, and one side reprobated as absurd errors, what the other maintained as conclusive dogmas.