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The notion of travel as an exercise in universalizing discourse, particularly fitting to scholastic notions of how knowledge was to be sought, endured for a long time. But it was increasingly overlapped and eventually eclipsed by another tradition, which gave preeminence to the "eye" and to silent "observation." To a modern reader, one of the most anomalous features of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel sermons is the consistency with which they digress into human anatomy, rhetorically arguing the superiority of the eye over the ear. With inevitable juridical reference, travel is praised through favorable contrast between "eyewitness" and "hearsay" as legally admissible evidence and ground for valid judgment. Auricular knowledge and discourse identified with traditional authority, Aristotelianism, and the Schoolmen are devalued in favor of an "eye" believed to yield direct, unmediated, and personally verified experience. The shift accompanies a new naturalistic orientation and attains its purest expression in the seventeenth century, when it is nurtured by a fashion in courtly circles for Natural Philosophy and an epistemological individualism which enjoins every man to "see," verify, and, in a sense, create" the world anew for himself.