esteem themselves the only favourites of wisdom, and look
upon the rest of mankind as the dirt and rubbish of the creation: yet
these men's happiness is only a frantic craziness of brain; they build
castles in the air, and infinite worlds in a _vacuum_. They will give
you to a hair's breadth the dimensions of the sun, moon, and stars, as
easily as they would do that of a flaggon or pipkin: they will give a
punctual account of the rise of thunder, of the origin of winds, of
the nature of eclipses, and of all the other abstrusest difficulties
in physics, without the least demur or hesitation, as if they had been
admitted into the cabinet council of nature, or had been eye-witnesses
to all the accurate methods of creation; though alas nature does
but laugh at all their puny conjectures; for they never yet made one
considerable discovery, as appears in that they are unanimously agreed
in no one point of the smallest moment; nothing so plain or evident but
what by some or other is opposed and contradicted. But though they are
ignorant of the artificial contexture of the least insect, they vaunt
however, and brag that they know all things, when indeed they are unable
to construe the mechanism of their own body: nay, when they are so
purblind as not to be able to see a stone's cast before them, yet they
shall be as sharp-sighted as possible in spying-out ideas, universals
separate forms, first matters, quiddities, formalities, and a hundred
such like niceties, so diminutively small, that were not their eyes
extremely magnifying, all the art of optics could never make them
discernible. But they then most despise the low grovelling vulgar
when they bring out their parallels, triangles, circles, and other
mathematical figures, drawn up in battalia, like so many spells
and charms of conjuration in muster, with letters to refer to the
explication of the several problems; hereby raising devils as it
were, only to have the credit of laying them, and amusing the ordinary
spectators into wonder, because they have not wit enough to understand
the juggle. Of these some undertake to profess themselves judicial
astrologers, pretending to keep correspondence with the stars, and so
from their information can resolve any query; and though it is all but a
presumptuous imposture, yet some to be sure will be so great fools as to
believe them.

[Illustration: 262]

The divines present themselves next; but it may perhaps be most safe to
pass the