(9) This facility of credit and accepting or admitting things weakly
authorised or warranted is of two kinds according to the subject:
for it is either a belief of history, or, as the lawyers speak,
matter of fact; or else of matter of art and opinion. As to the
former, we see the experience and inconvenience of this error in
ecclesiastical history; which hath too easily received and
registered reports and narrations of miracles wrought by martyrs,
hermits, or monks of the desert, and other holy men, and their
relics, shrines, chapels and images: which though they had a
passage for a time by the ignorance of the people, the superstitious
simplicity of some and the politic toleration of others holding them
but as divine poesies, yet after a period of time, when the mist
began to clear up, they grew to be esteemed but as old wives'
fables, impostures of the clergy, illusions of spirits, and badges
of Antichrist, to the great scandal and detriment of religion.
(10) So in natural history, we see there hath not been that choice
and judgment used as ought to have been; as may appear in the
writings of Plinius, Cardanus, Albertus, and divers of the Arabians,
being fraught with much fabulous matter, a great part not only
untried, but notoriously untrue, to the great derogation of the
credit of natural philosophy with the grave and sober kind of wits:
wherein the wisdom and integrity of Aristotle is worthy to be
observed, that, having made so diligent and exquisite a history of
living creatures, hath mingled it sparingly with any vain or feigned
matter; and yet on the other side hath cast all prodigious
narrations, which he thought worthy the recording, into one book,
excellently discerning that matter of manifest truth, such whereupon
observation and rule was to be built, was not to be mingled or
weakened with matter of doubtful credit; and yet again, that
rarities and reports that seem uncredible are not to be suppressed
or denied to the memory of men.
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