These are certainly the magisterial and masterpieces of the Creator, the
flower, or (as we may say) the best part of nothing, actually existing,
what we are but in hopes, and probability; we are only that amphibious
piece between a corporeal and spiritual essence, that middle form that
links those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature,
that jumps not from extremes, but unites the incompatible distances by
some middle and participating natures. That we are the breath and
similitude of God, it is indisputable, and upon record of holy Scripture;
but to call ourselves a microcosm, or little world, I thought it only a
pleasant trope of rhetoric, till my near judgment and second thoughts
told me there was a real truth therein: for first we are a rude mass, and
in the rank of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kind of being
not yet privileged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we
live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at
last the life of spirits, running in one mysterious nature those five
kinds of existences, which comprehend the creatures not only of the world
but of the universe; thus is man that great and true amphibium, whose
nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in divers
elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be
but one to sense, there are two to reason; the one visible, the other
invisible, whereof Moses seems to have left description, and of the other
so obscurely, that some parts thereof are yet in controversy. And truly
for the first chapters of Genesis, I must confess a great deal of
obscurity; though divines have to the power of human reason endeavoured
to make all go in a literal meaning, yet those allegorical
interpretations are also probable, and perhaps the mystical method of
Moses, bred up in the hieroglyphical schools of the Egyptians.
The whole creation is a mystery, and particularly that of man. At the
blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare
word they started out of nothing: but in the frame of man (as the text
describes it) he played the sensible operator, and seemed not so much to
create, as make him. When he had separated the materials of other
creatures, there consequently resulted a form and soul; but having raised
the walls of man, he was driven to a second and harder creation of a
substance like himself, an incorruptible and immortal soul. . . . In our
study of anatomy there is a mass of mysterious philosophy, and such as
reduced the very heathens to divinity; yet amongst all those rare
discoveries, and curious pieces I find in the fabric of man, I do not so
much content myself, as in that I find not--that is, no organ or
instrument for the rational soul: for in the brain, which we term the
seat of reason, there is not anything of moment more than I can discover
in the cranium of a beast: and this is a sensible and no inconsiderable
argument of the inorganity of the soul, at least in that sense we usually
so conceive it. Thus we are men, and we know not how; there is something
in us that can be without us, and will be after us, though it is strange
that it hath no history what it was before us, nor cannot tell how it
entered in us.