if not of all knowledge, at least of many things
more than belong to them,--principles, all of them true to a certain point,
yet all degenerating into error and quackery, because they are carried to
excess, viz. at the point where they require interpretation and restraint
from other quarters, and because they are employed to do what is simply
too much for them, inasmuch as a little science is not deep philosophy.

Lord Bacon has set down the abuse, of which I am speaking, among the
impediments to the Advancement of the Sciences, when he observes that "men
have used to infect their meditations, opinions, and doctrines, with some
conceits which they have most admired, or _some Sciences which they have
most applied_; and give all things else a _tincture_ according to them
_utterly untrue and improper_.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}" So have the alchemists made a philosophy
out of a few experiments of the furnace; and Gilbertus, our countryman,
hath made a philosophy out of the observations of a lodestone. So Cicero,
when, reciting the several opinions of the nature of the soul, he found a
musician that held the soul was but a harmony, saith pleasantly, "hic ab
arte sua non recessit," "he was true to his art." But of these conceits
Aristotle speaketh seriously and wisely when he saith, "Qui respiciunt ad
pauca, de facili pronunciant," "they who contemplate a few things have no
difficulty in deciding."

5.

And now I have said enough to explain the inconvenience which I conceive
necessarily to result from a refusal to recognize theological truth in a
course of Universal Knowledge;--it is not only the loss of Theology, it is
the perversion of other sciences. What it unjustly forfeits, others
unjustly seize. They have their own department, and, in going out of it,
attempt to do what they really cannot do; and that the more mischievously,
because they do teach what in its place is true, though when out of its
place, perverted or carried to excess, it is not true. And, as every man
has not the capacity of separating truth from falsehood, they persuade the
world of what is false by urging upon it what is true. Nor is it open
enemies alone who encounter us here, sometimes it is friends, sometimes
persons who, if not friends, at least have no wish to oppose Religion, and
are not conscious they are doing so; and it will carry out my meaning more
fully if I give some illustrations of it.

As to friends, I may take as an instance the