Solomon pleased God when he desired it. He is wise because He knows all
things; and He knows all things because He made them all; but His
greatest knowledge is in comprehending that He made not--that is,
Himself. The wisdom of God receives small honour from those heads that
rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire His works. Those
highly magnify Him whose judicious inquiry into His acts, and a
deliberate research into His creatures, return the duty of a devout and
learned admiration. Every essence, created or uncreated, hath its final
cause and some positive end both of its essence and operation. This is
the cause I grope after in the works of Nature; on this hangs the
providence of God.

That Nature does nothing in vain is the only indisputable axiom in
philosophy. There are no grotesques in Nature, nor anything framed to
fill up unnecessary spaces. I could never content my contemplation with
those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the
increase of the Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north; but
have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and
neglected pieces of Nature which, without further travel, I find in the
cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us;
there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my divinity: besides that
written one of God, another of His servant, Nature, that universal and
public manuscript, that lies expansed unto the eyes of all. Surely the
heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters than we
Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics,
and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of Nature. Now, Nature is
not at variance with art, nor art with Nature, they being both the
servants of His providence. Art is the perfection of Nature. Nature hath