be the better able after the conclusion of their conference to give them my sence upon the Subject of it, (The number of Elements or Principles:) which he promis’d I should do at the end of the present Debates, if time would permit, or else at our next meeting. And this being by him undertaken in my name, though without my consent, the company would by no means receive my Protestation against it, but casting, all at once, their eyes on Carneades, they did by that and their unanimous silence, invite him to begin; which (after a short pause, during which he turn’d himself to Eleutherius and me) he did in this manner.
Notwithstanding the subtile reasonings I have met with in the books of the Peripateticks, and the pretty experiments that have been shew’d me in the Laboratories of Chymists, I am of so diffident, or dull a Nature, as to think that if neither of them can bring more cogent arguments to evince the truth of their assertion then are wont to be brought; a Man may rationally enough retain some doubts concerning the very number of those materiall Ingredients of mixt bodies, which some would have us call Elements, and others principles. Indeed when I considered that the Tenents concerning the Elements are as considerable amongst the Doctrines of natural Philosophy as the Elements themselves are among the bodies of the Universe, I expected to find those Opinions solidly establish’d, upon which so many others are superstructed. But when I took the pains impartially to examine the bodies themselves that are said to result from the blended Elements, and to torture them into a confession of their constituent Principles, I was quickly induc’d to think that the number of the Elements has been contended about by Philosophers with more earnestness then success. This unsatisfiedness of mine has been much wonder’d at, by these two Gentlemen (at which words he pointed at Themistius and Philoponus) who though they differ almost as much betwixt themselves about the question we are to consider, as I do from either of them, yet they both agree very well in this, that there is a determinate number of such ingredients as I was just now