, on which all other philosophy ought to depend; and consisteth, principally, in right limiting of the significations of such appellations or names as are of all others the most universal; which limitations serve to avoid ambiguity and equivocation in reasoning; and are commonly called definitions; such as are the definitions of body, time, place, matter, form, essence, subject, substance, accident, power, act, finite, infinite, quantity, quality, motion, action, passion, and divers others, necessary to the explaining of a man’s conceptions concerning the nature and generation of bodies. The explication, that is, the settling of the meaning, of which, and the like terms, is commonly in the schools called “metaphysics”; as being a part of the philosophy of Aristotle, which hath that for title. But it is in another sense; for there it signifieth as much as “books written or placed after his natural philosophy”: but the schools take them for “books of supernatural philosophy”; for the word “metaphysics” will bear both these senses. And indeed that which is there written is for the most part so far from the possibility of being understood, and so repugnant to natural reason, that whosoever thinketh there is anything to be understood by it, must needs think it supernatural.