t
flowers, shady woods, pine trees, pleasant meadows,
high, mountains, springs, streams and rivers, and the
broad arm of the immeasurable sea ... and above
all shine the stars, completing their course in the
clear sky in wonderful splendour and majestic order.

Raymundus von Sabieude, a Spaniard, who studied medicine and
philosophy at Toulouse, and wrote his _Theologia Naturalis_ in 1436,
considered Nature, like Thomas Aquinas, from a mystical and
scholastic point of view, as made up of living beings in a graduated
scale from the lowest to the highest; and he lauded her in terms
which even Pope Clement VII. thought exaggerated. Piety in him went
hand in hand with a natural philosophy like Bacon's, and his interest
in Nature was rather a matter of intellect than feeling.

God has given us two books--the book of all living beings, or
Nature, and the Holy Scriptures. The first was given to man from
the beginning when all things were created, for each living being
is but a letter of the alphabet written by the finger of God, and
the book is composed of them all together as a book is of letters
... man is the capital letter of this book. This book is not like
the other, falsified and spoilt, but familiar and intelligible;
it makes man joyous and humble and obedient, a hater of evil and
a lover of virtue.

Among the savants of the Renaissance who applied the inductive method
to Nature before Bacon,[14] we must include the thoughtful and pious
Spaniard Luis Vives (1540), who wrote concerning the useless
speculations of alchemists and astrologers about occult things: 'It
is not arguing that is needed here, but silent observation of
Nature.' Knowledge of Nature, he said, would serve both body and
soul.

The tender religious lyrics of the mystic, Luis de Leon, followed
next.[15] His life (1521-1591) brings us up to the days of the
Inquisition. He himself, an excellent teacher and man of science, was
imprisoned for years for opinions too openly expressed in his
writings; but with all his varied fortunes he never lost his innate
manliness and tenderness. His biographer tells us, that as soon as
the holidays began, he would hurry away from the gloomy lecture rooms
and the noisy students at Salamanca, to the country, where he had
taken an estate belonging to a monastery at the foot of a hill by a
river, with a little island close by.

It had a large uncultivated gar