Let us next examine the great introducers of new schemes in
philosophy, and search till we can find from what faculty of the
soul the disposition arises in mortal man of taking it into his head
to advance new systems with such an eager zeal in things agreed on
all hands impossible to be known; from what seeds this disposition
springs, and to what quality of human nature these grand innovators
have been indebted for their number of disciples, because it is
plain that several of the chief among them, both ancient and modern,
were usually mistaken by their adversaries, and, indeed, by all,
except their own followers, to have been persons crazed or out of
their wits, having generally proceeded in the common course of their
words and actions by a method very different from the vulgar
dictates of unrefined reason, agreeing for the most part in their
several models with their present undoubted successors in the
academy of modern Bedlam, whose merits and principles I shall
further examine in due place. Of this kind were Epicurus, Diogenes,
Apollonius, Lucretius, Paracelsus, Des Cartes, and others, who, if
they were now in the world, tied fast and separate from their
followers, would in this our undistinguishing age incur manifest
danger of phlebotomy, and whips, and chains, and dark chambers, and
straw. For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did
ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind
exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet
this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the
empire of reason. Epicurus modestly hoped that one time or other a
certain fortuitous concourse of all men's opinions, after perpetual
jostlings, the sharp with the smooth, the light and the heavy, the
round and the square, would, by certain clinamina, unite in the
notions of atoms and void, as these did in the originals of all
things. Cartesius reckoned to see before he died the sentiments of