According to Aristotle, if the sublunar world was characterized by mutability, the supralunar world was—on the contrary—absolutely immutable. The fundamental principles of Aristotelian physics were in fact matter, form, and privation, and the natural sublunar world was therefore the location where according to these principles generation and corruption took place. Independent philosophers offered alternatives to these principles and to the Aristotelian hylemorphic apparatus. In order to describe nature within its own limits, Bernardino Telesio (1509–1588)—a staunch opponent of Aristotelianism—defended a different set of principles which had already been proposed by authors such Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) and Girolamo Fracastoro (circa 1476–1553), and which he argued was based on data gathered from experience rather than on arbitrary constructions. These alternative principles were passive matter and active force, the latter distinguished into heat and cold. It was the interplay—or rather, the battle—between these opposite forces that brought about the natural world.  Since every natural being depends on the interaction between cold and heat, it must know what is necessary for its survival: therefore everything, including the forces themselves, possesses sensation, which was not related to the faculties of the soul, as in Aristotelian psychology. This connection between sensus and self-preservation was also advocated by Tommaso Campanella, who emphasized its importance for natural magic. Telesio’s polemical refusal of Aristotle and his call for physical inquiry made within natural limits was appreciated and praised even by those who recognized the contradictions in his theories. Francesco Patrizi (1529–1597), who attacked Aristotle from a Platonic perspective in his Nova de Universis Philosophia (1591), rebuked Telesio for the latter’s claim to have relied exclusively on the senses and rejected reason: he pointed out that, in reality, Telesio did rely on metaphysical arguments, though he claimed to deny them (for his part, Patrizi believed that natural philosophy requires metaphysical tools to fill in its gaps). The same recognition of too much reliance on metaphysics drove Francis Bacon (1561–1626) to reject Telesio’s views in favor of experimental empiricism and of a full endorsement of the testimony of sensory perception.