but infinite in that infinite void space, mobile, and absolutely indivisible. These, they say, are corpuscles devoid of void, full, solid, and hard, the true principles, primary bodies, primary magnitudes, and the seeds of all things. In vegetables and animals, therefore, they admit a living form, which, however, is fashioned from purer portions of the elements and the most subtle ones, and is coextensive with the whole body. 7. The opinion of the Corpuscularists and specifically Descartes, who assign to all natural bodies, including the human, that matter is extension itself, or a substance continuously extendable by itself into all dimensions, and indefinitely divisible, so that even space becomes the same as substance or extended matter; but they admit no living soul in vegetables and animals besides the rational soul in our body as a true substantial form and a truly absolute substance. 8. The opinion of other moderns, who do not totally adhere to either the Gassendian or the Cartesian sentence, but prefix for themselves such principles as easily elude most difficulties that can never be sufficiently declined by others, and satisfy all phenomena that need explaining. We therefore choose from these 8 opinions of principles and prefix for ourselves, to be explained for the present, the Modern Atomistic, Modern Chemical, and the Peripatetic (which we wish to be ascribed to the Modern Galenists). Let it be.

POINT I.

The opinion of our Galenists is reported.

Galen indeed seemed to be little concerned with exhausting this doctrine, leaving it for philosophers to discuss and immediately proceeding to the integral principles of the human body, namely the elements. But

the Modern Galenists, that is, those who are still today delighted with Galenic opinions and use Galen's method of healing above all, are pleased today, together with Aristotle, to have knowledge concerning the natural state of the human body, and to think with his Peripatetic followers, namely that there is a primary matter as that incomplete substance, and a substantial form, which is a true substance not only in the human but also in any other body, yet equally incomplete, so that it constitutes one thing by itself with matter. There is also in any composite another and peculiar one. And although some of them attempt to revive the Platonic Dogma of the soul of the world in their own way, establishing that entities are not to be multiplied without necessity, hence to overthrow so many myriads of forms and, above all, to escape the danger lest this whole universe should be called a "one by accident," they posit only one substantial form or universal soul in the universe, called by others the spirit of the world, which together with matter physically composes this whole universe and every part of it, so that this soul of the world informs all animate and inanimate things. Although, I say, these proponents also obtain their probabilities in this revived dogma of the ancients, we nevertheless prepare ourselves in this point only to understand the Peripatetic doctrine correctly, and we propose our Galenists under this doctrine, who therefore: