and becoming more perfect.  As originally invented they are commonly rude, clumsy, and shapeless; afterwards they acquire new powers and more commodious arrangements and constructions; in so far that men shall sooner leave the study and pursuit of them and turn to something else, than they arrive at the ultimate perfection of which they are capable.  Philosophy and the intellectual sciences, on the contrary, stand like statues, worshiped and celebrated, but not moved or advanced.  Nay, they sometimes flourish most in the hands of the first author, and afterwards degenerate.  For when men have once made over their judgments to others’ keeping, and (like those senators whom they called Pedarii) have agreed to support some one person’s opinion, from that time they make no enlargement of the sciences themselves, but fall to the servile office of embellishing certain individual authors and increasing their retinue.  And let it not be said that the sciences have been growing gradually till they have at last reached their full stature, and so (their course being completed) have settled in the works of a few writers; and that there being now no room for the invention of better, all that remains is to embellish and cultivate those things which have been invented already.  Would it were so!  But the truth is that this appropriating of the sciences has its origin in nothing better than the confidence of a few persons and the sloth and indolence of the rest.  For after the sciences had been in several parts perhaps cultivated and handled diligently, there has risen up some man of bold disposition, and famous for methods and short ways which people like, who has in appearance reduced them to an art, while he has in fact only spoiled all that the others had done.  And yet this is what posterity like, because it makes the work short and easy, and saves further inquiry, of which they are weary and impatient.  And if any one take this general acquiescence and consent for an argument of weight, as being the judgment of Time, let me tell him that the reasoning on which he relies is most fallacious and weak.  For, first, we are far from knowing all that in the matter of sciences and arts has in various ages and places been brought to light and published; much less, all that has been by private persons secretly attempted and stirred, so neither the births nor the miscarriages of Time are entered in our records.  Nor, secondly, is the consent itself and the time it has continued a consideration of much worth.  For however various are the forms of civil politics, there is but one form of polity in the sciences; and that always has been and always will be popular.  Now the doctrines which find most favour with the populace are those which are either contentious and pugnacious, or specious and empty; such, I say, as either entangle assent or tickle it.  And therefore no doubt the greatest wits in each successive age have been forced out of their own course, men of capacity and intellect above