Note 105 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

Yet even in the calculated extravagance of this last pronouncement there is a ground for question whether the fallen Chancellor, hoping to retrieve himself, and trying every device of his ripe sagacity to avert opposition, was not straining his formal orthodoxy beyond his real intellectual habit. As against such wholesale affirmation we have his declarations that “certain it is that God worketh nothing in nature but by second causes,” and that any pretence to the contrary “is mere imposture as it were in favour towards God, and nothing else but to offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie”;105 his repeated objection to the discussion of Final Causes;106 his attack on Plato and Aristotle for rejecting the atheistic scientific method of Democritus;107 his peremptory assertion that motion is a property of matter;108 and his almost Democritean handling of the final problem, in which he insists that primal matter is, “next to God, the cause of causes, itself only without a cause.”109 Further, though he speaks of Scriptural miracles in a conventional way,110 he drily pronounces in one passage that, “as for narrations touching the prodigies and miracles of religions, they are either not true or not natural, and therefore impertinent for the story of nature.”111 Finally, as against the formal capitulation to theology at the close of the De Augmentis, he has left standing in the first book of the Latin version the ringing doctrine of the original Advancement of Learning (1605), that “there is no power on earth which setteth up a throne or chair in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations, imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning”;112 and in his Wisdom of the Ancients113 he has contrived to turn a crude myth into a subtle allegory in behalf of toleration.