The Human Mind As A Mirror or Glass

¹ Learning should be delivered from the discredits and disgraces which it has received from disguised ignorance.

This ignorance sometimes appears:

• in the zeal and jealousy of divines
• in the severity and arrogancy of politics
• in the errors and imperfections of learned men themselves.

² Learned men say that:

• knowledge should be accepted with great limitation and caution
• aspiring to overmuch knowledge was the original temptation and sin that caused the fall of man
• knowledge was the serpent which entered into a man it made him swell Scientia inflat
• King Solomon censured knowledge

• Saint Paul gives a caveat, “That we be not spoiled through vain philosophy;”
• experience demonstrates how:
  • learned men have been arch-heretics
  • learned times have been inclined to atheism
  • the contemplation of second causes doth derogate from our dependence upon God, who is the first cause.

³ Their opinion is wrong.

The pure knowledge of Nature and universality is a knowledge that allows man to name other creatures in Paradise according to their proprieties.

It was not this pure knowledge which caused the fall.

Instead, it was the proud knowledge of good and evil, with an intent to:

• give law unto himself
• no longer depend on God’s commandments

These were the origins of the temptation.

No amount of knowledge, how great soever, can make man’s swell if he has the contemplation of God.

The Human Mind As A Mirror

The 2 principal senses of inquisition are the eye and the ear

This is why Solomon, speaking of them, said that the eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.

The senses are but reporters.

He placed after that calendar or ephemerides which he made of the diversities of times and seasons for all actions and purposes, and concluded:

“God hath made all things beautiful, or decent, in the true return of their seasons. Also He hath placed the world in man’s heart, yet cannot man find out the work which God worketh from the beginning to the end”.

He declared that God had framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass, capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light.

It:

• delighted in beholding the variety of things
• raised to find out and discern the ordinances and decrees of Nature.

The supreme or summary law of Nature he called “the work which God worketh from the beginning to the end”.

He insinuates that this supreme law is not possible to be found out by man. Yet that does not derogate from the mind’s capacity.

Instead, it may be referred to the impediments such as:

• the shortness of life
• ill conjunction of labours
• ill tradition of knowledge over from hand to hand
• many other inconveniences

Nothing is denied to man’s inquiry and invention. He does in another place rule over, when Solomon said: “The spirit of man is as the lamp of God, wherewith He searcheth the inwardness of all secrets.”

If such be the capacity of the mind of man, then there is no danger at all in the quantity of knowledge, how large soever, lest it should make it swell or out-compass itself.

Knowledge will have in it some nature of venom or malignity if it be taken without the true corrective. That venom will cause ventosity or swelling.

This corrective spice is charity.

• When added to knowledge makes it so sovereign

The Apostle immediately added this to the former clause:

“Knowledge blows up, but charity builds up”

This is similar to his other saying:

“If I spake with the tongues of men and angels, and had not charity, it were but as a tinkling cymbal.”

Solomon censured:

• the excess of writing and reading books
• the anxiety of spirit which redoundeth from knowledge

St. Paul admonished people to:

• not be seduced by vain philosophy
• let those places be rightly understood

They excellently set the true limitations where human knowledge is confined and circumscribed, yet without any such contracting or coarctation, so that it may comprehend all the universal nature of things.