It is too little to call man a little world; except God, man is a
diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the
world; than the world doth, nay, than the world is. And if those pieces
were extended, and stretched out in man as they are in the world, man
would be the giant, and the world the dwarf; the world but the map, and
the man the world. If all the veins in our bodies were extended to
rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that
lie upon one another, to hills, and all the bones to quarries of stones,
and all the other pieces to the proportion of those which correspond to
them in the world, the air would be too little for this orb of man to
move in, the firmament would be but enough for this star; for, as the
whole world hath nothing, to which something in man doth not answer, so
hath man many pieces of which the whole world hath no representation.
Enlarge this meditation upon this great world, man, so far as to
consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces; our
creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants; that reach
from east to west, from earth to heaven; that do not only bestride all
the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once; my thoughts
reach all, comprehend all. Inexplicable mystery; I their creator am in a
close prison, in a sick bed, any where, and any one of my creatures, my
thoughts, is with the sun, and beyond the sun, overtakes the sun, and
overgoes the sun in one pace, one step, everywhere. And then, as the
other world produces serpents and vipers, malignant and venomous
creatures, and worms and caterpillars, that endeavour to devour that
world which produces them, and monsters compiled and complicated of
divers parents and kinds; so this world, ourselves, produces all these
in us, in producing diseases, and sicknesses of all those sorts:
venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases, and
manifold and entangled diseases made up of many several ones. And can
the other world name so many venomous, so many consuming, so many
monstrous creatures, as we can diseases of all these kinds? O miserable
abundance, O beggarly riches! how much do we lack of having remedies for
every disease, when as yet we have not names for them? But we have a
Hercules against these giants, these monsters; that is, the physician;
he musters up all the forces of the other world to succour this, all
nature to relieve man. We have the physician, but we are not the
physician. Here we shrink in our proportion, sink in our dignity, in
respect of very mean creatures, who are physicians to themselves. The
hart that is pursued and wounded, they say, knows an herb, which being
eaten throws off the arrow: a strange kind of vomit. The dog that
pursues it, though he be subject to sickness, even proverbially, knows
his grass that recovers him. And it may be true, that the drugger is as
near to man as to other creatures; it may be that obvious and present
simples, easy to be had, would cure him; but the apothecary is not so
near him, nor the physician so near him, as they two are to other
creatures; man hath not that innate instinct, to apply those natural
medicines to his present danger, as those inferior creatures have; he is
not his own apothecary, his own physician, as they are. Call back
therefore thy meditation again, and bring it down: what's become of
man's great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and
consumes himself to a handful of dust; what's become of his soaring
thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the
ignorance, to the thoughtlessness, of the grave? His diseases are his
own, but the physician is not; he hath them at home, but he must send
for the physician.