Bacon, like Bruno, was a believer in a purified natural magic, the handmaid of metaphysics, "because of its broad ways and wider dominion over nature."[611] They are united in their admiration for the Book of Job as a compendium of natural philosophy. Bacon writes that "if we take that small book of Job and diligently work through it, we shall find it full, and, as it were, pregnant with the mysteries of natural philosophy."[612] Both recur with conviction to the saying of Solomon that there is nothing new under the sun. "As to novelty, there is no one who has thoroughly imbibed letters and philosophy, but has had it impressed on his heart that there is nothing new upon the earth."[613] Deeper harmonies, if not more suggestive, exist between the two reformers of philosophy than these. One is the argument against authority, against general agreement, against antiquity of belief, as grounds or reasons _for_ belief, and the special application of this argument to undermine the hold of the Aristotelian philosophy upon the minds of men. "It is the old age of the world and the fulness of years that are to be regarded as its true antiquity. For that age, with respect to us ancient and older, with respect to the world itself was new and younger." "As we expect greater knowledge and maturer judgment from an old man than from a young, so from our own age we should expect (if it knew its strength, and were willing to make trial and to put it forth) far greater things than from old times," etc.[614] So faith and religion are to be kept apart from investigation, science, or philosophy, although the latter does not on that account carry us away from God; the one shows the will, the other (natural philosophy) the power of God.[615] To faith are to be given the things that are of faith, to philosophy the things that are of philosophy.[616] It was on the same ground also--the use of other than natural principles to explain natural phenomena--that both Bruno and Bacon condemned the physical works of Aristotle. He "corrupted natural philosophy with his dialectics--gave the human soul, the noblest of substances, a genus from words of second intention; settled the business of the _dense_ and the _rare_, through which bodies occupy greater or less dimensions or spaces, by the feigned distinction between act and potency; asserted a unique and proper movement of each body, being more concerned for an answer one might make in a discussion and to have something positive in words, than for the inward truth of things, as is best shown by a comparison of his philosophy with the others celebrated among the Greeks." And Bacon, like Bruno and other innovators of the day, goes back to Anaxagoras, Leucippus and Democritus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Heraclitus, whose principles "have something of natural philosophy, and savour of the nature of things--experience, bodily existence, whereas the physics of Aristotle, for the most part, sound of nothing but dialectical terms."[617]