bedaubed and dirtyed face and eyes and all that hee could never since the midwife raked him out all wet and dropping like a drown'd mouse once see cleerly what was sense and what nonsense to this very day Wherefore we will set the saddle on the right Horse and his Theomagick Nag shall bear the blame of the miscarriage Pag. 3. Lin. 3. I tooke to task the fruits of one Spring c. Here Anthroposophus is turned Herbalist for one whole Spring damned to the grasse and fields like Nebuchadnezzar when he went on all four among the Beasts But see how slow this Snail amongst the herbs is in finding out the truth when he confesses it was the work of one whole Spring to find out that the Earth or seeds of flowers are nothing like the flowers There 's not any old Garden-weeder in all London but without a pair of spectacles will discover that in four minutes which he has beene a full fourth part of a year about But certainely he intends a great deal of pomp and ceremony that will not take up such a conclusion as this viz. That things that are produced in Nature are out of something in Nature which is not like the things produced but upon the full experience and meditation of one entire Spring And now after this whole Springs meditation and experience hee is forced to turn about to him whom hee so disdainfully flies and confesse two of the three principles of the Aristotelean Physicks viz. Matter and Privation that homo is ex non homine arbor ex non arbore c. But this Matter he says and it is the wisest word he has spoken yet he knowes not what it is But presently blots his credit again with a new peece of folly intimating hee will finde it it out by experience Which is as good sense as if hee should say hee would see it when his eyes are out For it is alike easie to see visibles without eyes as to see invisibles with eyes But he flyes off hence and is in quest after a substance which he smels out like a nosegay in Natures bosome Which substance hee hopes to see by Art Why Eugenius are you so sharp sighted that you can see substances A kind of Philosophick Hog he can see the wind too I warrant you But how can you hope to see that substance when Nature only exposes it to her own vitall celestiall breath And tell what this Breath is and doe not amaze us with strange words or else keep your breath to your self to cool your poctage Pag. 4. Here a fit of devotion has taken him and I am neither so irreligious nor uncivill as to interrupt him But now Sir you have done I hope it will not be any offence to addresse my discourse to you again And it will not be unseasonable to tell you that truth is not to be had of God Almighty for an old song no nor yet for a new one And that no man is to measure his wisdom by his devotion but by his humility purity of mind and unprejudicate reason nor that any man is wiser by making others seem more contemptibly foolish as your juvenility has thought good to deal with poor Aristotle and his Orthodox Disciples all this time Nay and that you may not take Sanctuary at Moses his Text let mee also tell you that before you prove any thing thence you ought first to make good that Scripture is intended for naturall Philosophy as well as a divine life But we need not arm our selves so well yet for from the fourth page to the eight page nothing is said but that God from a knowing Principle made the World Which Aristotle also seems to assert while he is so frequent in telling the ends of naturall things which could not be sense unlesse he supposed that Nature was guided by a knowing Principle which is to acknowledge a God after the best manner And that subtil Philosopher Julius Scaliger uses no contemptible arguments to prove that Aristotles Philosophy furnisheth us also with the knowledge of a Trinity in God so that Anthroposophus is very unkind and uncivill to so good a Master Pages 8. and 9. What an Aristotelean would dispatch in a word or two viz. that life is alwayes accompanied with a naturall warmth hee is mysteriously sumbling out and drayling on to the length of almost two whole pages Pag. 9. Lin. 10. the divine light pierced the bosome of the matter c. This compared with what is at the bottome of the fourth page wee see that this rare philosopher tells us that the matter is an horrible emptie darknesse And me thinks his description is an hideous empty phansie and conveys not so much to the understanding as Aristotles description of the Matter which hee would describe to be The first subject out of which every thing is This latter is more cleane and sober the other more slabby and phantasticall And to call it Primitive waters 〈…〉 s but yet metaphors and poetry For you doe not mean waters such as we wash our hands in But they must be waters and dark that you may bring in the conceit of the light shining in them that like rivers and pooles the images of trees and birds and clouds and stars and what not may bee seen in them And this must help us coconceive that upon the breaking through of the light the divine idea's shone in the waters and that the holy Spirit not being able to see till then by looking then upon those images framed the matter into form But I pray you tell mee Mr. Anthroposophus that would be so wise as if you stood by while God made the world doe not you think that God can now see in the dark or behold his own idea's in the depth of the Earth You 'll say you doe not mean this naturall light but a divine light If so was ever the matter so stiff and clammy dark as to be able to keepe it out So that the divine idea's shone in the water so soon as God was and the Spiritus Opifex could see to begin his work ab cmni retro aeternitate And it could never be dark in your blind sense Is it not so Anthroposophus Lin 25. Si plantam quasi momento nasci c. If Anthroposophus had such a device a 〈…〉 this in a glasse what a fine gew-gaw would it be for the lad What fine sport would he make with his companions He would make them beleeve then that he was a Conjurer indeed But what other use there would be of it Anthroposophus truly I doe not know For it would not state one controversie in Philosophy more then what may be done without it For whether there be any such things as rationes seminales or whether these forms visible arise from heat which is motion and the conspiracy of fitted particles is as well and safely determined from your experiments of one spring as from this strange whimwham
so little as an Epistle and therefore would insinuate that it was an Oration made to the Fratres R. C. I suppose at their meeting at Fryer Bacons brasen head in Oxford Well! be it what it will be my observation here Anthroposophus is that you would also by your addresse to the Fratres R. C. make the world beleeve that you are now mellowing apace and are not much unripe for admission into that Society And then Anthroposophus would be a rare Theomagician indeed But enough of this vein of mirth and levity Now Philalethes your brother Tel-troth intends to fall more closely on your bones and to discover whether you have not a greater minde to seem to be wise then to be so indeed or to make others so But yet you may assure your self I will only find flaws not make any in you but rather candidly passe over what may receive any tolerably good interpretation nor touch the soar anywhere but where I may hope to heal it either in your self or others And that this may be done without any tedious taking a peeces of what you have put together I shall fairly passe from page to page without any Analytical Artifice And truly from the first page to middle of the fourth page of you to the Reader there be many pretty smart elegant humorous contextures of phrases and things But there presently after Fryer Bacons Fool and his fellow you fall upon our Peripateticks as such superficiall Philosophasters because they cannot lay open to you the very essence of the soul Why Anthroposophus can you tell the very essence of any substantiall thing Hereby you show your self very raw and unexercised in meditation in that you have not yet taken notice what things are knowable what not And thus may you have as ill a trick put upon you for want of this discerning as the old dim and doting woman had that with her rotten teeth endeavoured to crack a round pebble stone instead of a nut which was a thing impossible Nor will any mans understanding be it as sharp as it will enter the bare essence of any thing But the nearest wee can get is to know the powers and operations the respects and fitnesses that things have in themselves or toward others Which is so true that any man in a little search will presently satisfie himself in the evidence thereof From the middle of this fourth page to the middle of the six is continued a dance of Anticks or various ridiculous shiftings and postures of phansie to make Aristotle and his followers contemptible But such generall railings as they are mis-beseeming the Writer so they teach the Reader nothing but that the Authour of them is a Mome or a Mimick and more like an Ape by far then him that he compares to one If this man clap the wings so when hee has really got the foil for hitherto hee has charged Aristotle with no particular piece of ignorance but of what is impossible to be known what would he doe if he had the victory The second particular taxation for generals I hold nothing Dolosus ambulat in universalibus is that the Peripateticks fancy God to have made the World as a Carpenter of stone and timber But this is false because they give an inward principle of motion to all naturall bodies and there is one continuity of all as much as of the parts of water among themselves But their grand fault is that they doe not say the World is Animate But is not yours far greater Anthroposophus that gives so ridiculous unproportionable account of that Tenet The whole World is an Animal say you whose flesh is the earth whose bloud is the water the air the outward refreshing spirit in which it breaths the interstellar skies his vitall waters the Stars his sensitive fire But are not you a mere Animal your self to say so For it is as irrationall and incredible as if you should tell us a tale of a Beast whose bloud and flesh put together bears not so great a proportion to the rest of the more fluid parts of the Animal suppose his vitall and animal spirits as a mite in a cheese to the whole globe of the earth And beside this how shall this water which you call bloud be refreshed by the air that is warmer then it And then those waters which you place in the outmost parts towards his dappeld or spotted skin the coelum stellatum what over-proportionated plenty of them is there there In so much that this creature you make a diseased Animall from its first birth and ever labouring with an Anasarca Lastly how unproperly is the air said to be the outward refreshing spirit of this Animal when it is ever in the very midst of it And how rashly is the Flux and Reflux of the Sea assimilated to the pulse when the pulse is from the heart not the brain but the flux and reflux of the Sea from the Moon not the Sun which they that be more discreetly phantasticall then your self doe call Cor Mundi Wherefore Anthroposophus your phansies to sober men will seem as vain and puerile as those of idle children that imagine the fortuitous postures of spaul and snivell on plaster-walls to bear the form of mens or dogs faces or of Lyons and what not And yet see the supine stupidity and senslesnesse of this mans judgment that he triumphs so in this figment of his as so rare and excellent a truth that Aristotles Philosophy must be groundlesse superstition and popery in respect of it this the primevall truth of the creation when as it is a thousand times more froth then His is vomit My friend Anthroposophus is this to appear for the truth in a day of necessity Certainly shee 'll be well holpe at a dead lift if shee find no better champions then your self Verily Philalethes if you be no better in your Book then in your Preface to the Reader you have abused Moses his Text beyond measure For your Principles will have neither heaven nor earth in them head nor foot reason nor sense They will be things extra intellectum and extra sensum mere vagrant imaginations seated in your own subsultorious and skip-jack phansy only But what they are we shal now begin to examine according to the number of pages Anthroposophia Theomagica Pag. 2. Lio. 11. So have all souls before their entrance c. But hear you me Mr. Anthroposophus are you in good earnest that all souls before their entrance into the body have an explicite methodicall knowledge and would you venture to lose your wit so much by inprisoning your selfe in so darke a dungeon as to be able to write no better sense in your Preface to the Reader But I 'le excuse him it may be he was riding before his entrance into the body on some Theomagicall jade or other that stumbled and flung him into a mysticall quagmire against his will where he was so soused and doused and
may as well for ought any bodie knowes be a plaister for a gauld horses back or a Medicine for a Mad-dog as a receipt of the Philosophers Stone Pag. 27. In this page Magicus prophesies of a vitrification of the Earth and turning of it into a pure diaphanous substance To what end Magicus That the Saints and Angels at each pole of the Earth may play at Boe-peep with one another through this crystallized Globe Magicus has rare imaginations in his noddle Pag. 28. At the end of this page Magicus begins to take to task the explication of mans nature But Magicus you must first learn better to know your self before you attempt to explain the knowledge of man to others Pag. 29. Lin. 10. The Philosophicall Medicine This is the Philosophers stone And they that are ignorant in this point are but Quacks and Pispot Doctors Ho! Dr. H. Dr. P. Dr. R. Dr. T. and as many Doctors more as will stand betwixt London and Oxenford if you have not a slight of Art to Metamorphize your selves into Triorchises and have one stone more then Nature has bestowed upon you which is forsooth the Philosophers Stone have amongst you blind Harpers Magicus will not stick to teem Urinals on your heads and crown you all one after another with the Pispot and honour you with the Title of Quack-salvers What Magicus Is it not sufficient that you haue no sense nor wit but you will have no good manners neither Pag. 30. This thirtieth page teaches that the soul of man consists of two parts Ruach and Nephesh one Masculine and the other Feminine And Anthroposophus is so tickled with the Application of the conceit unto Marriage which he very feelingly and savourly pursues that he has not the patience to stay to tell us how these two differ hee being taken up so with that powerfull charm and thence accrewing Faculty of Crescite Multiplicamini Pag. 31. This page has the same Legend that the Alcoran has concerning the envy of the Angels But all goes down alike with him as if every thing printed were Gospel In so much that I am perswaded that he doubts not but that every syllable of his own Book it true now it has passed the Presse Pag. 32. This page ridiculously places Peter Ramus amongst the Schoolmen against all Logick and Method And at the last line thereof bids us arrigere aures and tels us he will convey some truth never heretofore discovered viz. That the sensitive gust in a man is the forbidden fruit with the rest of the circumstances thereof Which Theory is so far from being new that it is above a thousand years old It is in Origen and every where in the Christian Platonists Pag. 38. Lin 27. It is part of Anima Mundi Why is Anima Mundi which you say in men and beasts can see feel tast and smell a thiug divisible into parts and parcells Take heed of that Anthroposophus lest you crumble your own soul into Atoms iudeed make no soul but all body Pag. 39. Lin. 22. Blind Peripateticall formes What impudcnce is this O Magicus to call them so unlesse you make your Anima Mundi more intelligible This is but to rail at pleasure not to teach or confute Pag. 40. Lin. 2. As it is plain in dreams Blind men see in their sleep it seems which is more then they can doe when they are awake Are you in jest Eugenius or in good earnest If you be I shall suspect you having a faculty to see when you are a sleep that you have another trick too that is to dream when you are awake Which you practised I conceive very much in the compilement of this book there being more dreams then truth by far in it Lin. 11. Represent the eyes How phansiful and poeticall are you Mr. Magicus I suppose you allude to the herb Euphrasia or Eye-bright Which yet sees or feels as little light or heat of the Sun as your soul do's of reason or humanity Lin. 27. Angelicall or rationall spirit Do's not this see and hear too in man If it do not how can it judge of what is said or done If it do's then there is two hearing and seeing souls in a man Which I will leave to Anthroposophus his own thoughts to find out how likely that is to be true 46 47 48 49. Pages Truly Anthroposophus these pages are of that nature that though you are so unkind to Aristotle as to acknowledge nothing good in him yet I am not so inveterate a revengefull assertor of him but I will allow you your lucida intervalla What you have delivered in these pages bating a few Hyperboles might become a man of a more setled brain then Anthroposophus But while you oppose so impetuously what may with reason be admitted and propound so magisterially what is not sense I must tell you Anthroposophus that you betray to scorn and derision even those things that are sober in the way that you affect and hazard the soiling of the highest and most delicate truths by your rude and unskilfull handling of them And now the good breath that guided you forthese four pages together is spent you begin to rave again after the old manner and call Galen Antichrist in Pag. 50. And quarrel again with the Peripateticks and provoke the School-divines And then you fancie that you have so swinged them that in revenge they 'l all fall upon you at once and so twerilug you when as they good men feel not your strokes and find themselves something else to doe then to refute such crazy discourses as this It is only it is I your brother Philalethes that am moved with pity towards you and would if I could by carefully correcting you in your distempers bring you to a sober mind and set you in your right sense again And I beseech you brother Philalethes forbear this swearing An honest mans word is as good as his Oath No body will beleeve you more for swearing then he would doe without it but think you more melancholick and distracted Lin. 21. Whiles they contemn mysteries c. In this heat all that Philalethes writes must be termed holy mysteries His project certainly is now neither Episcopacy nor Presbyteri can be setled to get his booke established jure divino A crafty colt Ha ha he Philalethes Are you there with your bears Lin. 29. Next to God I owe all I have to Agrippa What more then to the Prophe 〈…〉 and Apostles Anthrosophus The businesse is for your fame-sake you have more desire to be thought a Conjurer then a Christian Pag. 53 54. Great glorious penman A piping hot p 〈…〉 per of verses indeed Anthroposophus But say truly What can you doe in or out of this heat more then other men Can you cure the sick Rule and counsell States and Kingdomes more prudently for the common good Can you find bread for the Poore Give a rationall account of the Phaenomena of
every heaving up by an Hypochondricall flatulency must bee conceited a rapture of the Spirit they professing themselves to receive things immediately from God when they are but the casuall figurations of their anxious phansie busily fluttering about the Text which they alwayes eye though they dissemble it as Hauks and Buzzards flye they never so high have their sight bent upon on the Earth And indeed if they should not forge their phansies into some tolerable suteablenesse with the letter of the Scripture they would never be able to beleeve themselves or at least to beget beleef in others that they are inspired And so that high conceit insinuated into them by that wonderfull yet ordinary imposterous power of Melancholy would fall to nothing and they appear not so much as to themselves either Prophets or inspired But this I have touched upon elsewhere I will let it goe Onely let me cast in thus much that he that mis-beleeves and layes aside clear and cautious reason in things that fall under the discussion of Reason upon the pretence of hankering after some higher principle which a thousand to one proves but the infatuation of Melancholy and a superstitious hallueination is as ridiculous as if hee would not use his naturall eyes about their proper object till the presence of some supernaturall light or till hee had got a pair of Spectacles made of the Crystalline Heaven or of the Coelum Empyreum to hang upon his Nose for him to look through The truth is hee that layes aside Reason casts away one of the most Soveraign Remedies against all melancholick impostures For I conceive it would bee very hard for men either to bee deluded themselves or to delude others by their conceited inspirations if they would expect that every Revelation should bee made good either by sound Reason or a palpable and conspicuous Miracle Which things if they were demanded of the inspired people when they come to seduce surely they would sneak away like the common Fidlers being asked to play a Lesson on the Organs or on the Theorbo Pag. 28 29. In the former page you could not part till you had made God and Nature mysteriously kisse In this you metamorphize Mercury and Sulphur into two Virgins and make the Sun to have more Wives then ever Solomon had Concubines Every Star must have in it Vxor Solis But what will become of this rare conceit of yours if the Stars themselves prove Suns And men far more learned then your self are very inclinable to think so But now hee has phansied so many Wives he falls presently upon copulation helter skelter and things done in private betwixt Males and Females c. Verily Anthroposophus if you had but the patience to consider your own Book seriously and examine what Philosophick truth you have all this while delivered since your contemning of Aristotle's definition of Nature Form and Soul you shall find in stead of his sober description from the proper operations and effects of things nothing but a dance of foolish and lascivious words almost every page being hung with Lawns and Tiffanies and such like Tapestry with black Shadowing hoods white Aprons and Peticoats and I know not what And this must bee a sober and severe Tractate of Anima Abscondita As if the Soul were dressed in womans apparell the better to bee concealed and to make an escape And to as much purpose is your heaps of liquorsome Metaphors of Kissing of Coition of ejection of Seed of Virgins of Wives of Love-whispers and of silent Embraces and your Magicians Sun and Moon those two Universall Peers Male and Female King and Queen Regents alwayes young and never old what is all this but a mere Morris-dance and May-game of words that signifie nothing but that you are young Anthroposophus and very sportfull and yet not so young but that you are marriageable and want a good wife that your sense may bee as busie as your phansie about such things those and so peradventure in due time the extravagancy of your heat being spent you may become more sober Pag. 30. Lin. 8. It is light only that can be truly multiplied But if you tell us not what this light is wee are still but in the dark I doe not mean whether Light bee a Virgin or a Wife or whose Wife or what clothes shee wears Tiffanies or Cobweblawns but in proper words what the vertue and nature of it is Whether Corpin or Spiritus Substance or Accident c. But Anthroposophus you doe noe desire at all to bee understood but pleas your self only to rant it in words ' which can procure you nothing but the admiration of fools If you can indeed doe any thing more then another man or can by sound reason make good any more truth to the World then another man can then it is something if not it is a mere noise and buzze for children to listen after Pag. 31. From this 31 page to the 41 you have indeed set down the most courageous and triumphant testimonies and of the highest and most concerning truth that belongs to the soul of man the attainment whereof is as much beyond the Philosophers Stone as a Diamond is beyond a pebble stone But the way to this mystery lies in a very few words which is a peremptory and persistent unravelling and releasing of the soul by the power of God from all touch and sense of sin and corruption Which every man by how much the more hee makes it his sincere aim by so much the more wise and discret he will appear and will be most able to jndge what is sound and what is flatuous But to deal plainly with you my Philalethes I have just cause to suspect that there is more winde then truth as yet in your writings And that it is neither from reason nor from experience that you seem to turn your face this way but high things and fiery and sonorous expressions of them in Authors being sutable to your Youthfulnesse and poeticall phansie you swagger and take on presently as if because you have the same measure of heat you were of the same Fraternity with the highest Theo magicians in the World Like as in the story where the Apples and Horsdung were carryed downe together in the same stream the Fragments of Horsdung cryed out Nos poma natamus Pardon the homelinesse of the comparison But you that have slung so much dirt upon Aristotle and the two famous Universities it is not so unjust if you bee a little pelted with dung your self Pag. 42. Lin. 12. I know some illiterate School-Divines c. He cannot be content to say any thing that he thinkes is magnificently spoken but hee must needs trample upon some or other by way of triumph and ostentation one while clubbing of Aristotle another while so pricking the Schoolmen and provoking the Orthodoxe Divines that he conceits they will all run upon him at once as the Jewes upon the young Martyr St.