The Platonic school, of which we have spoken, had, however, reached its highest point of prosperity before this time, and was already declining. About 1500, the Platonists appeared to triumph over the Peripatetics[95]; but the death of their great patron, Cardinal Bessarion, about this time, and we may add, the hollowness of their system in many points, and its want of fitness for the wants and expectations of the age, turned men's thoughts partly back to the established Aristotelian doctrines, and partly forwards to schemes of bolder and fresher promise. 6. _Francis Patricius._--Patricius, of whom we have just spoken, was one of those who had arrived at the conviction that the formation of a new philosophy, and not merely the restoration of an old one, was needed. In 1593, appeared his _Nova de Universis Philosophia_; and the mode in which it begins[96] can hardly fail to remind us of the expressions which Francis Bacon soon afterwards used in the opening of a work of the same nature. "Francis Patricius, being about to found anew the true philosophy of the universe, dared to begin by announcing the following indisputable principles." Here, however, the resemblance between Patricius and true inductive philosophers ends. His principles are barren _à priori_ axioms; and his system has one main element, _Light_, (_Lux_, or _Lumen_,) to which all operations of nature are referred. In general cultivation, and practical knowledge of nature, he was distinguished among his contemporaries. In various passages of his works he relates[97] observations which he had made in the course of his travels, in Cyprus, Corfu, Spain, the mountains of the Modenese, and Dalmatia, which was his own country; his observations relate to light, the saltness of the sea, its flux and reflux, and other points of astronomy, meteorology, and natural history. He speaks of the sex of plants[98]; rejects judicial astrology; and notices the astronomical systems of Copernicus, Tycho, Fracastoro, and Torre. But the mode in which he speaks of experiments proves, what indeed is evident from the general scheme of his system, that he had no due appreciation of the place which observation must hold in real and natural philosophy.