efore, would by no means merit
the appellation of a physician who should attempt to cure any part of the
human body, without a previous knowledge of the whole; so neither can he
know any thing truly of the vegetable life of plants, who has not a
previous knowledge of that vegetable life which subsists in the earth as
a whole prior to, because the principle and cause of all partial
vegetable life, and who still prior to this has not a knowledge of that
greater whole of this kind which subsists in nature herself; nor, as
Hippocrates justly observes, can he know any thing truly of the nature of
the human body who is ignorant what nature is considered as a great
comprehending whole. And if this be true, and it is so most indubitably,
with all physiological inquiries, how much more must it be the case with
respect to a knowledge of those incorporeal forms to which we ascended in
the first part of this Introduction, and which in consequence of
proceeding from wholes entirely exempt from body are participated by it,
with much greater obscurity and imperfection? Here then is the great
difference, and a mighty one it is, between the knowledge gained by the
most elaborate experiments, and that acquired by scientific reasoning,
founded on the spontaneous, unperverted, and self-luminous conceptions of
the soul. The former does not even lead its votary up to that one nature
of the earth from which the natures of all the animals and plants on its
surface, and of all the minerals and metals in its interior parts,
blossom as from a perennial root. The latter conducts its votary through
all the several mundane wholes up to that great whole the world itself,
and thence leads him through the luminous order of incorporeal wholes to
that vast whole of wholes, in which all other wholes are centred and
rooted, and which is no other than the principle of all principles, and
the fountain of deity itself. No less remarkable likewise, is the
difference between the tendencies of the two pursuits, for the one
elevates the soul to the most luminous heights, and to that great
ineffable which is beyond all altitude; but the other is the cause of a
mighty calamity to the soul, since, according to the elegant expression
of Plutarch, it extinguishes her principal and brightest eye, the
knowledge of divinity. In short, the one leads to all that is grand,
sublime and splendid in the universe; the other to all that is little,
groveling[14] and dark. The one i