. . . Now nature
is not at variance with art, nor art with nature: they being both
servants of His providence. Art is the perfection of nature: were the
world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath
made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial;
for nature is the art of God.
ON PHILOSOPHY
Beware of philosophy, is a precept not to be received in too large a
sense; for in this mass of nature there is a set of things that carry in
their front, though not in capital letters, yet in stenography, and short
characters, something of divinity, which to wiser reasons serve as
luminaries in the abyss of knowledge, and to judicious beliefs, as scales
and rundles to mount the pinnacles and highest pieces of divinity. The
severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that
this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a
portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they
counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.
ON FINAL CAUSE
There is but one first cause, and four second causes of all things; some
are without efficient, as God; others without matter, as angels; some
without form, as the first matter: but every essence, created or
uncreated, hath its final cause, and some positive end both of its
essence and operation; this is the cause I grope after in the works of
nature; on this hangs the providence of God.
Pages:
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68