The Strasburg Divines entered upon the subject so earnestly that their disquisition far exceeds in length the whole of the communications from the other Universities. Sennertus could not have wished for a more elaborate or a more gratifying reply. The Faculty at Altdorff said that the question was not a matter of faith, and therefore no one could be obnoxious to the charge of heresy for maintaining or controverting either of the opposite opinions. They seem however to have agreed with neither party; not with Freitagius because they denied that brute souls were of an elementary nature, not with Sennertus, because they denied that they were created at first from nothing. It is manifest, said they, that they are not now created from nothing, because it would follow from thence that they subsist of themselves, and are not dependent upon matter, and are consequently immortal, which is absurd. It remained therefore that the souls of brutes, as they do not now receive their existence from mere nothing, so neither did they at the first creation, but from something pre-supposed, which the Peripatetics call the power of matter or of the subject, which from the beginning was nothing else and still is nothing else, than its propension or inclination to this or that form. _Quæ forma multiplex, cum etiam in potentia primi subjecti passiva præcesserit, per miraculosam Dei actionem ex illa fuit educta, actumque essendi completum in variis animalium speciebus accepit._ Sennertus either published these papers or prepared them for publication just before his death. They were printed in octavo at Wittenberg, with the title _De Origine et Natura Animarum in Brutis, Sententiæ Cl. Theologorum in aliquot Germaniæ Academiis, 1638_. Sprengel observes that none of the Historians of Philosophy have noticed,— _Cætera desunt._ CHAPTER CCXL. THE JESUIT GARASSE'S CENSURE OF HUARTE AND BARCLAY.—EXTRAORDINARY INVESTIGATION.—THE TENDENCY OF NATURE TO PRESERVE ITS OWN ARCHETYPAL FORMS.—THAT OF ART TO VARY THEM.—PORTRAITS.—MORAL AND PHYSICAL CADASTRE.—PARISH CHRONICLER AND PARISH CLERK THE DOCTOR THOUGHT MIGHT BE WELL UNITED. Is't you, Sir, that know things? SOOTH. In nature's infinite book of secresy, A little I can read. SHAKSPEARE. The Jesuit Garasse censured his contemporaries Huarte and Barclay for attempting, the one in his _Examen de los Ingenios_, the other in his _Icon Animorum_, to class men according to their intellectual characters: _ces deux Autheurs_, says he, _se sont rendus criminels contre l'esprit de l'homme, en ce qu'ils ont entrepris de ranger en cinq ou six cahiers, toutes les diversitez des esprits qui peuvent estre parmy les hommes, comme qui voudroit verser toute l'eau de la mer dans une coquille._ For his own part, he had learnt, he said, _et par la lecture, et par l'experience, que les hommes sont plus dissemblables en esprit qu'en visage._