Abhandlung über die allgemeine Zusammenkunft der Freymaurer, bei den Gesundbrunnen in Wilhelmsbad

...guide the undertaking, determine the true purpose, and must establish excellent laws.

In the third and fourth parts, we wish to investigate whether it has done there what it could and should have done in order to arrive at that point.

However, before we begin this precise investigation, let me be permitted to throw out a few remarks about the nature of man, and to develop some very interesting truths that flow from these remarks.

Let us consider the theater of nature! The stars, although they are separated by various intervals, are nevertheless joined together, as if by a chain; they never depart from the path that is assigned to them. Do we not see on our globe how the cedar, which raises itself high on the summit of Lebanon, shades the weak plant that creeps and grows around it? The eagle directs its flight toward the star of the day, while the ostrich can hardly raise itself above the surface of the earth. A multitude of living beings inhabit the air; a host of others live

on the bottom of the waters. The earth is populated with countless animals that run about on its surface, while others are born, live, and die in its womb. There are animals of enormous size and thickness; so too are there those of incomprehensible smallness. Some are wild and consume everything they encounter, others are gentle and timid, living on the herbs of the meadows. This infinite variety, which awakens astonishment in the majestic order of the universe, is found so strikingly united in man that the philosophers original: "Weltweisen" have called him the microcosm small world. If men, in order to fulfill the intentions of the Highest Being, have a mutual resemblance to one another, they also possess no less characteristic differences. By a law of the Creator of Nature, the physical construction of man has such a dominant and distinguished influence on his moral edifice that one finds combined in man everything that one finds scattered in other animals. They are wild like the tiger, gentle like the sheep, proud like the lion, humble like the camel, industrious like the ant, lazy like the donkey, chaste like the elephant, lewd like the goat, industrious like the beaver, imitative like the monkey, vigilant like the rooster, and sly like the fox. In a word, one finds in man all the good and all the evil qualities that one finds

This page compares human nature to the vast diversity of the animal kingdom, establishing that humans contain all animal traits within them, a concept often referred to in esoteric philosophy as the microcosm.