Disputationes chymico-medicae (1614) - Page 16

THE PHILOSOPHER, OR THE PHYSICIAN

at having eaten acorns before grain was discovered? Will our descendants blush to use a better Cerere Ceres or grain, if perhaps a more merciful heaven should one day restore the golden ages? Oh, how stupid and sluggish we are! We who have unlearned the use of acorns and enjoy the present goods of Nature—should we, who are informed by better precepts from God, from Moses, and from the light of Nature, loathe, reject, and trample upon gifts that are difficult but not incomprehensible? Lift up your minds, you who perceive these things with healthy ears, and join me in removing this one anxiety: how a Physician who consults Nature, having been brought to the entrance of his Profession, should do anything rather than abandon the guarantee of such great fruits.

The wisest Craftsman created this entire and most beautiful structure of all things for the sake of man! And man was made for GOD. Man is therefore an inhabitant of this entire Universe, so that he may know both it and himself, and praise GOD with perpetual songs. According to this law of divinity, all of us who have been produced by Adam onto this stage in the various acts of the centuries seem not just taught but created, not just instructed but imbued with this purpose. Yet no one is permitted to be less of a guest in this Universe of things than the one who consults Nature. When the ancient Greeks wanted to describe the varied and remarkable learning found in the poems of Homer, they depicted him vomiting, while all the Professors of other noble arts—Grammarians, Poets, Orators, Lawyers, Physicians, and Magistrates of the State—ran toward him and stood around. They showed each of them choosing certain pieces from that sacred vomit and striving to apply them to the use of their own art. But if I were to paint the entire Creation vomiting with a similar brush, like the painting by a certain Galaton, I would make only the one who consults Nature reserve the most valuable part of the precious vomit for himself, leaving only small scraps for the scattered multitude of the hungry in the world. What then does the one who consults Nature

CONSULTED PHYSICIAN.

do? What does he achieve? To say everything in a few words: he contemplates the universal harmony of all Nature with untiring study. He enters into the accounting of the World itself. He lives in the whole globe. He breaks through the fortifications of heaven. He flies across the seas. He collects the courses and numbers of the stars. He diligently inquires into the arrangements of the Elements, the changes of the seasons, and the laws of generation and transplantation that contain and preserve the nature of the world. Furthermore, he explores the impressions made in the heavens: the origins of comets, winds, thunders, lightnings, rains, dew, frost, and snow. He investigates the tides and ebbs of the Ocean, the diversities of lands, the differences between plants, the origin, progression, and separation of metals and minerals, and the natures of animals.

You see, LISTENERS, within what narrow limits I do not circumscribe the Physicist; how strictly I do not define him. But it is so far from the case that I seem to impose things greater and more difficult than human strength can sustain with some Stoic austerity, that I rather affirm it is very easy to embrace all disciplines in the mind. It is only in uncultivated and unpleasant minds that the opinion of despair is usually found. I believe the mind is confused without cause by those who cry out, whose intellect or age does not seem sufficient to endure such things. But why did the marvelous skill of nature grant man no specific and peculiar art of his own? Surely because it was necessary for him to be equipped and adorned with all of them. Therefore, she exposed him naked and unarmed, but most kindly granted a supplement for his defects: namely, Reason and her servant hands. Reason is fit and suitable for receiving the cultivation of all arts; the hands, with their wondrously flexible curvature of joints, are a support for the body and the command of the mind. From this, one may truly admire the force of human nature, which is so swift and agile that at the same moment it can turn to many things.