131 k Whatever Sceptick, &c.] Sceptick. Pyrrho was the chief of the Sceptick Philosophers, and was at first, as Apollodorus saith, a painter, then became the hearer of Driso, and at last the disciple of Anaxagoras, whom he followed into India, to see the Gymnosophists. He pretended that men did nothing but by custom; there was neither honesty nor dishonesty, justice nor injustice, good nor evil. He was very solitary, lived to be ninety years old, was highly esteemed in his country, and created chief priest. He lived in the time of Epicurus and Theophrastus, about the 120th Olympiad. His followers were called Phyrrhonians; besides which they were named the Ephecticks and Aphoreticks, but more generally Scepticks. This sect made their chiefest good to consist in a sedateness of mind, exempt from all passions; in regulating their opinions, and moderating their passions, which they called Ataxia and Metriopathia; and in suspending their judgment in regard of good and evil, truth or falsehood, which they called Epechi. Sextus Empiricus, who lived in the second century, under the Emperor Antoninus Pius, writ ten books against the mathematicians or astrologers, and three of the Phyrrhonian opinion. The word is derived from the Greek SKEPTESZAI, quod est, considerare, speculare. [To consider or speculate] 143 l He cou'd reduce, &c.] The old philosophers thought to extract notions out of natural things, as chymists do spirits and essences; and, when they had refined them into the nicest subtilties, gave them as insignificant names as those operators do their extractions: But (as Seneca says) the subtiler things are they are but the nearer to nothing. So are all their definitions of things by acts the nearer to nonsense. 147 m Where Truth, &c.] Some authors have mistaken truth for a real thing, when it is nothing but a right method of putting those notions or images of things (in the understanding of man) into the same and order that their originals hold in nature, and therefore Aristotle says Unumquodque sicut habet secundum esse, ita se habet secundum veritatem. Met. L. ii. [As every thing has a secondary essence, therefore it has a secondary truth] 148 n Like words congeal'd, &c.] Some report in Nova Zembla, and Greenland, mens' words are wont to be frozen in the air, and at the thaw may heard. 151 In School-Divinity as able, As o he that Hight, Irrefragable, &c.] Here again is another alteration of three or lines, as I think, for the worse. Some specific epithets were added to the title of some famous doctors, as Angelicus, Irrefragabilis, Subtilis, [Angelic, Unopposable, Discriminating] &c. Vide Vossi Etymolog. Baillet Jugemens de Scavans, & Possevin's Apparatus