To the fourth, you pretend, that men are not now so tied to Aristotle as not to _enjoy a liberty of philosophising, though it were otherwise when I was conversant in Magdalen Hall_. Was it so then? Then am I absolved, unless you can show some public act of the university made since that time to alter it. For it is not enough to name some few particular ingenuous men that usurp that liberty in their private discourses, or, with connivance, in their public disputations. And your doctrine, that even here you avow, of _abstracted essences_, _immaterial substances_, and of _nunc-stans_; and your improper language in using the word (not as mine, for I have it nowhere) _successive eternity_; as also your doctrine of _condensation_, and your arguing from natural reason the incomprehensible mysteries of religion, and your malicious writing, are very shrewd signs that you yourselves are none of those which you say do _freely philosophise_; but that both your philosophy and your language are under the servitude, not of the Roman religion, but of the ambition of some other doctors, that seek, as the Roman clergy did, to draw all human learning to the upholding of their power ecclesiastical. Hitherto therefore there is no injury done to the universities. For the fifth, you grant it, namely, “_that till of late there was no allowance for the teaching of geometry_.” But lest you should be thought to grant me anything, you say, you the astronomer, “_geometry hath now so much place in the universities, that when Mr. Hobbes shall have published his philosophical and geometrical pieces, you assure yourself you shall be able to find a greater number in the university who will understand as much, or more, of them than he desired they should_,” &c. But though this be true of the _now_, yet it maketh nothing against my _then_. I know well enough that Sir Henry Savile’s lectures were founded and endowed since. Did I deny _then_ that there were in Oxford many good geometricians? But I deny _now_, that either of you is of the number. For my philosophical and geometrical pieces are published, and you have understood only so much in them, as all men will easily see by your objections to them, and by your own published geometry, that neither of you understand anything either in philosophy or in geometry. And yet you would have those books of yours to stand for an argument, and to be an index of the philosophy and geometry to be found in the universities. Which is a greater injury and disgrace to them, than any words of mine, though interpreted by yourselves.