2 The Reader may not be displeased to read the following beautiful passage from Jeremy Taylor.
“If God is glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare fabric of the honeycombs, in the discipline of bees, in the economy of pismires, in the little houses of birds, in the curiosity of an eye, God being pleased to delight in those little images and reflexes of himself from those pretty mirrors, which, like a crevice in the wall, through a narrow perspective, transmit the species of a vast excellency: much rather shall God be pleased to behold himself in the glasses of our obedience, in the emissions of our will and understanding; these being rational and apt instruments to express him, far better than the natural, as being near communications of himself.”—Invalidity of a late or Death-bed Repentance, Vol. v. p. 464.
He was not acquainted with the speculation, or conception (as the Philotheistic philosopher himself called it) of Giordano Bruno, that deformium animalium formæ, formosæ sunt in cœlo. Nor would he have assented to some of the other opinions which that pious and high minded victim of papal intolerance, connected with it. That metallorum in se non lucentium formæ, lucent in planetis suis, he might have supposed, if he had believed in the relationship between metals and planets. And if Bruno's remark applied to the Planets only, as so many other worlds, and did not regard the future state of the creatures of this our globe, the Doctor might then have agreed to his assertion that non enim homo, nec animalia, nec metalla ut hic sunt, illic existunt. But the Philotheist of Nola, in the remaining part of this his twelfth Conceptus Idearum soared above the Doctor's pitch: Quod nempe hic discurrit, he says, illic actu viget, discursione superiori. Virtutes enim quæ versus materiam explicantur: versus actum primum uniuntur, et complicantur. Unde patet quod dicunt Platonici, ideam quamlibet rerum etiam non viventium, vitam esse et intelligentiam quandam. Item et in Primâ Mente unam esse rerum omnium ideam. Illuminando igitur, vivificando, et uniendo est quod te superioribus agentibus conformans, in conceptionem et retentionem specierum efferaris. Here the Philosopher of Doncaster would have found himself in the dark, but whether because “blinded by excess of light,” or because the subject is within the confines of uttermost darkness, is not for me his biographer to determine.
CHAPTER CCXIV.
FURTHER DIFFICULTIES.—QUESTION CONCERNING INFERIOR APPARITIONS.—BLAKE THE PAINTER, AND THE GHOST OF A FLEA.
In amplissimá causâ, quasi magno mari, pluribus ventis sumus vecti.
PLINY.