Physiologia Medica

...most worthy thing from its own sources of nature.

If we now consider the reason for the Method employed, we will easily perceive that he has elicited it here also from the nature of things with a most successful effort, as he was always accustomed to do. For as a thing is, so it is known. Therefore, through causes and accidents, keeping either a natural order among them (from internal to external things and accidents or effects) if we wish to teach and bring forward a thing already known and discovered by us according to its nature; or an artificial order (by proceeding from external things and effects to internal things) if we wish to discover. Having entered by this path, we will become so firmly in control of the observed thing that, together with the words and things absorbed by the applied method, we will have a firm memory of them, and will be able to extract a definition, both essential and perfect, with ease. On the other hand, if things are not reduced to their sources of causes, nor causes arranged in a proper order among themselves, that which is known is not understood; or that which is thought to be understood may vanish from the memory of one or another name or precept, with no easy way or mode of discovery to bring it back into the memory. It is of such great importance to have studied by a true method and to have reduced everything to its infallible rule—precepts that were otherwise wandering here and there in the great error of confusion and uncertain knowledge. Since Theodor Zwinger the father excelled in this kind with the deep consensus of all, it is surprising, generous...

...Veznici, when I once took into my hands the Political Commentary of Johann Keckermann Bartholomaeus Keckermann, a famous logician and polymath, that he, a young man, was of such audacity that he should act as a common censor of literature and pass judgment on the whole troop of scholars—unprompted, neither called nor asked—as if he could or should do so. And if he thought he saw any blemish on the bright face of another, he would point it out with his middle finger extended. Then he attacked Zwinger, who had deserved so excellently of the literary world, with equal liberty. Whether that was done properly or learnedly—so as not to mix entirely foreign matters into this place—let it be the judgment of others. I say only this: if our own labors and offspring are to be suppressed until the ninth year, as Horace wisely and truly warns Reference to Horace's "Ars Poetica," advising authors to wait before publishing, and by no means rushed lest "blind puppies be born," how much more truly should judgment on the labors of others be deferred for many years? If this is not done, and it happens to us as judges what happens to us as writers—that later cares and later judgments are better and fairer than the earlier ones—with what face shall we remember the injuries committed against others? Let us therefore restrain the impulses of youthful years, and let us prefer to imitate the better men rather than to disparage them.

Meanwhile, it is certain, as we wished to say at the beginning, that the argument of the present little book should by no means be estimated as old, or as something so often said and repeated, because of the more exquisite knowledge of the things proposed and the singular perfection original: "axelēſian" / "akribeian," meaning precision of the method employed: the occasion for composing which...