Nay, they are,
indeed, but remoras and hindrances to stay and slug the ship from
further sailing; and have brought this to pass, that the search of
the physical causes hath been neglected and passed in silence. And,
therefore, the natural philosophy of Democritus and some others, who
did not suppose a mind or reason in the frame of things, but
attributed the form thereof able to maintain itself to infinite
essays or proofs of Nature, which they term fortune, seemeth to me
(as far as I can judge by the recital and fragments which remain
unto us) in particularities of physical causes more real and better
inquired than that of Aristotle and Plato; whereof both intermingled
final causes, the one as a part of theology, and the other as a part
of logic, which were the favourite studies respectively of both
those persons; not because those final causes are not true and
worthy to be inquired, being kept within their own province, but
because their excursions into the limits of physical causes hath
bred a vastness and solitude in that tract.
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