11. I have made this short digression because it appeared to me seasonable at a time when there is only too much tendency to overthrow natural religion to its very foundations. I return then to the Averroists, who were persuaded that their dogma was proved conclusively in accordance with reason. As a result they declared that man's soul is, according to philosophy, mortal, while they protested their acquiescence in Christian theology, which declares the soul's immortality. But this distinction was held suspect, and this divorce between faith and reason was vehemently rejected by the prelates and the doctors of that time, and condemned in the last Lateran Council under Leo X. On that occasion also, scholars were urged to work for the removal of the difficulties that appeared to set theology and philosophy at variance. The doctrine of their incompatibility continued to hold its ground _incognito_. Pomponazzi was suspected of it, although he declared himself otherwise; and that very sect of the Averroists survived as a school. It is thought that Caesar Cremoninus, [81] a philosopher famous in his time, was one of its mainstays. Andreas Cisalpinus, a physician (and an author of merit who came nearest after Michael Servetus to the discovery of the circulation of the blood), was accused by Nicolas Taurel (in a book entitled _Alpes Caesae_) of belonging to these anti-religious Peripatetics. Traces of this doctrine are found also in the _Circulus Pisanus Claudii Berigardi_, an author of French nationality who migrated to Italy and taught philosophy at Pisa: but especially the writings and the letters of Gabriel Naude, as well as the _Naudaeana_, show that Averroism still lived on when this learned physician was in Italy. Corpuscular philosophy, introduced shortly after, appears to have extinguished this excessively Peripatetic sect, or perhaps to have been intermixed with its teaching. It may be indeed that there have been Atomists who would be inclined to teach dogmas like those of the Averroists, if circumstances so permitted: but this abuse cannot harm such good as there is in Corpuscular philosophy, which can very well be combined with all that is sound in Plato and in Aristotle, and bring them both into harmony with true theology.