That which is now called an University, is a joining together, and an incorporation under one government of many public schools in one and the same town or city. In which, the principal schools were ordained for the three professions, that is to say, of the Roman religion, of the Roman law, and of the art of medicine. And for the study of philosophy, it hath no otherwise place than as a handmaid to the Roman religion: and since the authority of Aristotle is only current there, that study is not properly philosophy (the nature whereof dependeth not on authors), but “Aristotelity.” And for geometry, till of very late times it had no place at all; as being subservient to nothing but rigid truth. And if any man, by the ingenuity of his own nature, had attained to any degree of perfection therein, he was commonly thought a magician, and his art diabolical.
Now to descend to the particular tenets of vain philosophy, derived to the Universities, and thence into the Church, partly from Aristotle, partly from blindness of understanding; I shall first consider their principles. There is a certain philosophia prima , 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