The most remote fields are invaded by the four elements. It is by reference to them that the seasons are explained. Here use is made rather of their properties than of the elements themselves. “The spring is composed of moisture and heat; the summer, of fire and dryness; the autumn, of dryness and cold; the winter, of cold and moisture.”[86] From this the transition is easy to another far-fetched application of the theory. The four quarters of the universe, East, West, North, and South, are connected with the four seasons, and thus with the four elements. This conception seemed to Isidore so important that he introduced a figure to illustrate it. ([Fig. II.])
Fig. 3.
The old notion that man is a microcosm or parallel of the universe on a small scale, was familiar to Isidore. As has been shown, he believed that man was composed of the same four elements as the universe, and that they were distributed in him in much the same way as in it. It was going only a step further for him to declare that “all things are contained in man, and in him exists the nature of all things”;[87] after which it was easy “to place man in communion with the fabric of the universe”[88] by means of a figure. ([Fig. III.])
The idea of the parallelism of man and the universe, when thus literally conceived, was a fruitful one. Man could be explained by the universe. And the process could be reversed and the universe also explained by man, since man may be observed in his entirety and his life history may be easily followed, while that of the universe may not. Isidore doubtless took this view, for he says: “The plan of the universe is to be inquired into according to man alone. For just as man passes to his end through definite ages, so too the universe is passing away during this prolonged time, since both man and the universe decay after they reach their growth.”[89] The division of the life of the universe, for example, into six definite ages, which he incorporated into his chronology, was given greater certainty and meaning from the similar division of man’s life into six ages.
The wide scope assigned by Isidore to the action of the four elements—which scope includes the immaterial as well as the material—is completely alien to the modern way of thinking; as is, also, the bringing of the universe, the year, and man, into so intimate and specific a connection. Still more difficult is it for us to grasp such an idea as that the ounce “is reckoned a lawful weight because the number of its scruples measures the hours of the day and night”;[90] or that “the Hebrews use twenty-two letters of the alphabet, following the [number of] books in the Old Testament”.[91] And the climax is reached when he expresses the notion that a man bursts into tears as soon as he casts himself down on his knees, because the knees and the eyes are close together in the womb.[92]
Although these examples of Isidore’s thinking afford excellent proof of his incoherence and lack of logical consecutiveness, their explanation goes deeper. Like all primitive thinkers, those of medieval times were firmly convinced of the solidarity of the universe; they felt its unity much more strongly than they did its multiplicity; what we regard as separate kinds of phenomena and separate ways of viewing the universe they regarded as of necessity closely inter-related. There were no categories of thought that were for them mutually exclusive; they carried their ideas without hesitation from the material into the immaterial, and from the natural into the supernatural. No conception established in one sphere seemed impertinent in any other. It was this state of mind that enabled the medieval thinker to take such erratic leaps from one sphere of thought to another, without any feeling of uncertainty or any fear of getting lost.[93]
Perhaps nothing illustrates more clearly the erratic thinking to which this idea of the solidarity of the universe led, than the way in which Isidore reasons about number. To his mind the fact, for instance, that “God in the beginning made twenty-two works” explains why there are twenty-two sextarii in the bushel; and that “there were twenty-two generations from Adam to Jacob, and twenty-two books of the Old Testament as far as Esther, and twenty-two letters of the alphabet out of which the divine law is composed”,[94] were additional explanations for the same thing. A like connection is found in his statement that “the pound is counted a kind of perfect weight because it is made up of as many ounces as the year has months”.[95]
Isidore’s conceptions in regard to number, indeed, deserve to be ranked closely after the theory of the four elements as affording to him “paths of intelligence” through the universe, material and immaterial. Both in the world at large and in the microcosm of man the harmony of “musical numbers” is an essential;[96] and number is also an essential factor in every part and aspect of the universe. “Take number from all things,” he says, “and all things perish.”[97] However, his idea of the importance of number in the world is equaled only by the vagueness with which he conceived its operations as a working principle. Here he takes absolute leave of the logic which, in his account of the four elements, he had already so often left behind. The best he could do, in describing the actual operation of this principle, was to make lists of instances in which the same number occurred, and no matter how unrelated the spheres of thought thus connected, to assume their close interrelation and explanation of one another.