[63] As Bacon very frequently cites these authors, a slight notice of their labors may not be unacceptable to the reader. Bernardinus Telesius, born at Cosenza, in 1508, combated the Aristotelian system in a work entitled “De Rerum Natura juxta propria principia,” _i.e._, according to principles of his own. The proem of the work announces his design was to show that “the construction of the world, the magnitude and nature of the bodies contained in it, are not to be investigated by reasoning, which was done by the ancients, but are to be apprehended by the senses, and collected from the things themselves.” He had, however, no sooner laid down this principle than he departed from it in practice, and pursued the deductive method he so much condemned in his predecessors. His first step was an assumption of principles as arbitrary as any of the empirical notions of antiquity; at the outset of his book he very quietly takes it for granted that heat is the principle of motion, cold of immobility, matter being assumed as the corporeal substratum, in which these incorporeal and active agents carry on their operations. Out of these abstract and ill-defined conceptions Telesius builds up a system quite as complete, symmetrical, and imaginative as any of the structures of antiquity. Francis Patricius, born at Cherso, in Dalmatia, about 1529, was another physicist who rose up against Aristotle, and announced the dawn of a new philosophy. In 1593 appeared his “Nova de Universis Philosophia.” He lays down a string of axioms, in which scholastic notions, physical discoveries, and theological dogmas, are strangely commingled, and erects upon them a system which represents all the grotesque features of theological empiricism. Severinus, born in Jutland, in 1529, published an attack on Aristotle’s natural history, but adopted fantasies which the Stagyrite ridiculed in his own day. He was a follower of Paracelsus, a Swiss enthusiast of the fifteenth century, who ignored the ancient doctrine of the four elements for salt, sulphur and mercury, and allied chemistry and medicine with mysticism.--_Ed._ [64] Bacon’s apology is sound, and completely answers those German and French critics, who have refused him a niche in the philosophical pantheon. One German commentator, too modest to reveal his name, accuses Bacon of ignorance of the calculus, though, in his day, Wallis had not yet stumbled upon the laws of continuous fractions; while Count de Maistre, in a coarse attack upon his genius, expresses his astonishment at finding Bacon unacquainted with discoveries which were not heard of till a century after his death.--_Ed._ [65] Philip of Macedon. [66] See Plato’s Timæus. [67] The saying of Philocrates when he differed from Demosthenes.--_Ed._