Of this kind were Epicurus, Diogenes,
Apollonius, Lucretius, Paracelsus, Des Cartes, and others, who, if
they were now in the world, tied fast and separate from their
followers, would in this our undistinguishing age incur manifest
danger of phlebotomy, and whips, and chains, and dark chambers, and
straw. For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did
ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind
exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet
this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the
empire of reason. Epicurus modestly hoped that one time or other a
certain fortuitous concourse of all men's opinions, after perpetual
jostlings, the sharp with the smooth, the light and the heavy, the
round and the square, would, by certain clinamina, unite in the
notions of atoms and void, as these did in the originals of all
things. Cartesius reckoned to see before he died the sentiments of
all philosophers, like so many lesser stars in his romantic system,
rapt and drawn within his own vortex.
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