downwards toward the earth, and others go naturally from it, the schools will tell you out of Aristotle, that the bodies that sink downwards are “heavy,” and that this heaviness is it that causes them to descend. But if you ask what they mean by “heaviness,” they will define it to be an endeavour to go to the centre of the earth. So that the cause why things sink downward, is an endeavour to be below; which is as much as to say, that bodies descend, or ascend, because they do. Or they will tell you the centre of the earth is the place of rest, and conservation for heavy things; and therefore they endeavour to be there: as if stones and metals had a desire, or could discern the place they would be at, as man does; or loved rest, as man does not; or that a piece of glass were less safe in the window than falling into the street.
If we would know why the same body seems greater, without adding to it, one time than another, they say, when it seems less, it is “condensed”; when greater, “rarified.” What is that “condensed,” and “rarified?” Condensed is when there is in the very same matter, less quantity than before, and rarified, when more. As if there could be matter that had not some determined quantity; when quantity is nothing else but the determination of matter; that is to say, of body, by which we say, one body is greater or lesser than another, by thus or thus much. Or as if a body were made without any quantity at all, and that afterwards more or less were put into it, according as it is intended the body should be more or less dense.
For the cause of the soul of man, they say, creatur infundendo , and creando infunditur : that is, “it is created by pouring it in,” and “poured in by creation.”
For the cause of sense, an ubiquity of “species”; that is, of the “shows” or “apparitions” of objects; which when they be apparitions to the eye, is “sight”; when to the ear, “hearing”; to the palate, “taste”; to the nostril, “smelling”; and to the rest of the body, “feeling.”