He holds, of course, the unity of the world; the laws of the whole visible universe are one order; but the heavens, wonderful as they are to him, are--compared with other things--out of his track of inquiry.

He had his astronomical theories; he expounded them in his "_Descriptio Globi Intellectualis_" and his _Thema Coeli_ He was not altogether ignorant of what was going on in days when Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were at work.

But he did not know how to deal with it, and there were men in England, before and then, who understood much better than he the problems and the methods of astronomy.

He had one conspicuous and strange defect for a man who undertook what he did.

He was not a mathematician: he did not see the indispensable necessity of mathematics in the great _Instauration_ which he projected; he did not much believe in what they could do.