THIRD BOOK 



CHAPTER I 



Division of Learning into Theology and Philosophy. The latter 

 divided into the Knowledge of God, of Nature, and of Man. Con- 

 struction of Philosophia Prima as the Mother of all the Sciences. 



TO THE KING 



ALL history, excellent King, treads the earth, performing 

 the office of a guide rather than of a light : and poetry 

 is, as it were, the stream of knowledge a pleasing 

 thing full of variations, and affects to be inspired with divine 

 rapture, to which treasures also pretend. But now it is time 

 I should awake and raise myself from the earth, and explore the 

 liquid regions of philosophy and the sciences. Knowledge is 

 like waters ; some descend from the heavens, some spring from 

 the earth. For all knowledge proceeds from a twofold source 

 either from divine inspiration or external sense. As for that 

 knowledge which is infused by instruction, that is cumulative, 

 not original, as it is in waters, which, besides the head-springs, 

 are increased by the reception of other rivers which fall into 

 them. We shall, therefore, divide sciences into theology and 

 philosophy. In the former we do not include natural theology, 

 of which we are to speak anon, but restrict ourselves to inspired 

 divinity, the treatment of which we reserve for the close of the 

 work, as the fruit and sabbath of all human contemplations. 

 Philosophy has three objects ; viz., God, nature, and man ; as 

 also three kinds of rays for nature strikes the human intellect 

 with a direct ray, God with a refracted ray, from the inequality 

 of the medium betwixt the Creator and the creatures, and man, 

 as exhibited to himself, with a reflected ray : whence it is proper 

 to divide philosophy into the doctrine of the deity, the doctrine 

 of nature, and the doctrine of man. 



But as the divisions of the sciences are not like different lines 

 that meet in one angle, but rather like the branches of trees that 



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