"The natural philosophy of Democritus and some others, who did not suppose a mind or reason in the frame of things, but attributed the form thereof able to maintain itself to infinite essays or proofs of nature, which they term fortune, seemeth to me... in particularities of physical causes more real and better inquired than that of Aristotle and Plato; whereof both intermingled final causes, the one as a part of theology, and the other as a part of logic, which were the favourite studies respectively of both those persons. Not because those final causes are not true, and worthy to be inquired, being kept within their own province; but because their excursions into the limits of physical causes hath bred a vastness and solitude in that tract."
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Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605) Book VII, 7
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy
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Natural philosophy
Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis) has been described as the philosophical study of nature and the physical universe that was dominant before the development of modern science, and as the precursor to the natural sciences. However, it is described by some below as "a word still used for physics at the Scottish universities" as late as 1949, as the "love of a knowledge of the productions of nature or God," and that the "science of today is in danger of l
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