Beware of philosophy, is a precept not to be received in too large a
sense; for in this mass of nature there is a set of things that carry in
their front, though not in capital letters, yet in stenography, and short
characters, something of divinity, which to wiser reasons serve as
luminaries in the abyss of knowledge, and to judicious beliefs, as scales
and rundles to mount the pinnacles and highest pieces of divinity. The
severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that
this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a
portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they
counterfeit some real substance in that invisible fabric.