XCV. Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical.57 The former like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts. The true labor of philosophy resembles hers, for it neither relies entirely or principally on the powers of the mind, nor yet lays up in the memory the matter afforded by the experiments of natural history and mechanics in its raw state, but changes and works it in the understanding. We have good reason, therefore, to derive hope from a closer and purer alliance of these faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been attempted.
XCVI. Natural philosophy is not yet to be found unadulterated, but is impure and corrupted—by logic in the school of Aristotle, by natural theology in that of Plato,58 by mathematics in the second school of Plato (that of Proclus and others)59 which ought rather to terminate natural philosophy than to generate or create it. We may, therefore, hope for better results from pure and unmixed natural philosophy.