Produced by Al Haines
THE HUMANISTS' LIBRARY
Edited by Lewis Einstein
I
LEONARDO DA VINCI
THOUGHTS
ON ART AND LIFE
THOUGHTS
ON
ART AND LIFE
BY
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Translated
by
MAURICE BARING
Boston
The Merrymount Press
1906
Copyright, 1906, by D. B. Updike
A TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ix
I. Thoughts on Life 3
II. Thoughts on Art 59
III. Thoughts on Science 141
IV. Bibliographical Note 193
V. Table of References 194
{ix}
INTRODUCTION
* *
*
The long obscurity of the Dark Ages lifted over Italy, awakening to a
national though a divided consciousness. Already two distinct
tendencies were apparent. The practical and rational, on the one hand,
was soon to be outwardly reflected in the burgher-life of Florence and
the Lombard cities, while at Rome it had even then created the civil
organization of the curia. The novella was its literary triumph. In
art it expressed itself simply, directly and with vigour. Opposed to
this was the other great undercurrent in Italian life, mystical,
religious and speculative, which had run through the nation from the
earliest times, and received fresh volume from mediaeval Christianity,
encouraging ecstatic mysticism to drive to frenzy the population of its
mountain cities. Umbrian painting is inspired by it, and the glowing
words of Jacopone da Todi expressed in poetry the same religious
fervour which the life of Florence and Perugia bore witness to in
action.
Italy developed out of the relation and conflict of these two forces
the rational with the mystical. Their later union in the greater men
was to {x} form the art temperament of the Renaissance. The practical
side gave it the firm foundation of rationalism and reality on which it
rested; the mystical guided its endeavour to picture the unreal in
terms of ideal beauty.
The first offspring of this union was Leonardo. Since the decay of
ancient art no painter had been able to fully express the human form,
for imperfect mastery of technique still proved the barrier. Leonardo
was the first completely to disengage his personality from its
constraint, and make line express thought as none before him could do.
Nor was this his only triumph, but rather the foundation on which
further achievement rested. Remarkable as a thinker alone, he
preferred to enlist thought in the service of art, and make art the
handmaid of beauty. Leonardo saw the world not as it is, but as he
himself was. He viewed it through the atmosphere of beauty which
filled his mind, and tinged its shadows with the mystery of his nature.
To all this, his birthright as a painter, a different element was
added. A keen desire for knowledge, guiding his action in life,
spurred him onward. Conscious of this dominant impulse, he has
fancifully described himself in a Platonic allegory. He had passed
beneath overhanging cliffs on his way to a great cavern. On bended
knees, peering through its darkness, fear and desire had overwhelmed
him,--fear for the menacing darkness of the cavern; and desire {xi} to
ascertain if there were wonders therein.
From his earliest years, the elements of greatness were present in
Leonardo. But the maturity of his genius came unaffected from without.
He barely noticed the great forces of the age which in life he
encountered. After the first promise of his boyhood in the Tuscan
hills, his youth at Florence had been spent under Verrocchio as a
master, in company with those whose names were later to brighten the
pages of Italian art. He must then have heard Savonarola's impassioned
sermons, yet, unlike Botticelli, remained dumb to his entreaties. He
must have seen Lorenzo the Magnificent. But there was little opening
in the Medicean circle for the young painter, who had first to gain
fame abroad. The splendour of Milan under Il Moro, then the most
brilliant court in Europe, attracted him. He went there, proclaiming
his ability, in a remarkable letter, to accomplish much, but desiring
chiefly to erect a great monument to the glory of the Sforza. He spent
years at that court, taken up by his different ventures,--painting,
sculpture, engineering, even arranging festivities--but his greater
project was doomed to failure, enmeshed in the downfall of Ludovico.
Even to this he remained impassive. "Visconti dragged to prison, his
son dead, ... the duke has lost his state, his possessions, his
liberty, and has finished nothing he undertook," was his only comment
on his patron's end, written on the {xii} margin of a manuscript.
After the overthrow of the Duke of Milan, began his Italian wanderings.
At one time he contemplated entering the service of an Oriental prince.
Instead, he entered that of Caesar Borgia, as military engineer, and
the greatest painter of the age became inspector of a despot's
strongholds. But his restless nature did not leave him long at this.
Returning to Florence he competed with Michelangelo; yet the service of
even his native city could not retain him. His fame had attracted the
attention of a new patron of the arts, prince of the state which had
conquered his first master. In this his last venture, he forsook
Italy, only to die three years later at Amboise, in the castle of the
French king.
The inner nature of Leonardo remained as untouched by the men he
encountered as by the events which were then stirring Europe. Alone,
he influenced others, remaining the while a mystery to all. The most
gifted of nations failed to understand the greatest of her sons.
Isabella d'Este, the first lady of her time, seeking vainly to obtain
some product of his brush, was told that his life was changeful and
uncertain, that he lived for the day, intent only on his art. His own
thoughts reveal him in another light. "I wish to work miracles," he
wrote. And elsewhere he exclaimed, "Thou, O God, sellest us all
benefits, at the cost of our toil.... As a day well spent makes sleep
{xiii} seem pleasant, so a life well employed makes death pleasant. A
life well spent is long."
Leonardo's views of aesthetic are all important in his philosophy of
life and art. The worker's thoughts on his craft are always of
interest. They are doubly so when there is in them no trace of
literary self-consciousness to blemish their expression. He recorded
these thoughts at the instant of their birth, for a constant habit of
observation and analysis had early developed with him into a second
nature. His ideas were penned in the same fragmentary way as they
presented themselves to his mind, perhaps with no intention of
publishing them to the world. But his ideal of art depended
intimately, none the less, on the system he had thrown out seemingly in
so haphazard a manner. His method gives to his writings their only
unity. It was more than a method: it was a permanent expression of his
own life, which aided him to construct a philosophy of beauty
characteristic of the new age.
He had searched to find a scientific basis for art, and discovered it
in the imitation of nature, based on rational experience. This idea
was, in part, Aristotelian, imbibed with the spirit of the time; though
in the ordinary acceptance of the word Leonardo was no scholar, least
of all a humanist. His own innovation in aesthetic was in requiring a
rational and critical experience as a necessary {xiv} foundation, the
acquisition of which was to result from the permanent condition of the
mind. He had trained his own faculties to critically observe all
natural phenomena: first try by experience, and then demonstrate why
such experiment is forced to operate in the way it does, was his
advice. The eye, he gave as an instance, had been defined as one
thing; by experience, he had found it to be another.
But by imitation in art, Leonardo intended no slavish reproduction of
nature. When he wrote that "the painter strives and competes with
nature," he was on the track of a more Aristotelian idea. This he
barely developed, using nature only partly in the Stagirite's sense, of
inner force outwardly exemplified. The idea of imitation, in fad, as
it presented itself to his mind, was two-fold. It was not merely the
external reproduction of the image, which was easy enough to secure.
The real difficulty of the artist lay in reflecting inner character and
personality. It was Leonardo's firm conviction that each thought had
some outward expression by which the trained observer was able to
recognize it. Every man, he wrote, has as many movements of the body
as of varieties of ideas. Thought, moreover, expressed itself
outwardly in proportion to its power over the individual and his time
of life. By thus employing bodily gesture to represent feeling and
idea, the painter could affect the spectator whom he {xv} placed in the
presence of visible emotion. He maintained that art was of slight use
unless able to show what its subject had in mind. Painting should aim,
therefore, to reproduce the inner mental state by the attitude assumed.
This was, in other words, a natural symbolism, in which the symbol was
no mere convention, but the actual outward projection of the inner
condition of the mind. Art here offered an equation of inward purpose
and outward expression, neither complete without the other.
Further than this, influenced by Platonic thought, Leonardo's
conception of painting was, as an intellectual state or condition,
outwardly projected. The painter who practised his art without
reasoning of its nature was like a mirror unconsciously reflecting what
was before it. Although without a "manual act" painting could not be
realized, its true problems--problems of light, of colour, pose and
composition, of primitive and derivative shadow--had all to be grasped
by the mind without bodily labour. Beyond this, the scientific
foundation in art came through making it rest upon an accurate
knowledge of nature. Even experience was only a step towards attaining
this. "There is nothing in all nature without its reason," he wrote.
"If you know the reason, you do not need the experience."
In the history of art, as well, he urged that nature had been the test
of its excellence. A {xvi} natural phenomenon had brought art into
existence. The first picture in the world, he remarked in a happy
epigram, had been "a line surrounding the shadow of a man, cast by the
sun on the wall." He traced the history of painting in Italy during
its stagnation after the decay of ancient art, when each painter copied
only his predecessor, which lasted until Giotto, born among barren
mountains, drew the movements of the goats he tended, and thus advanced
farther than all the earlier masters. But his successors only copied
him, and painting sank again until Masaccio once more took nature as
his guide.
A quite different and combative side to Leonardo's aesthetic, which
forced him to state the broad principles of art, appears in his attacks
on poetry and music as inferior to painting. In that age of humanistic
triumph, literature had lorded it over the other arts in a manner not
free from arrogance. There was still another cause for his onslaught
on poetry. Leonardo resented the fact that painters, who were rarely
men of education, had not defended themselves against the slurs cast on
their art. His counter attack may have been intended to hide his own
small scholarship. It served another end as well. His conception of
the universal principles of beauty was made clear by this defence. His
first principle stated broadly that the most useful art was the one
which could most easily be communicated. {xvii} Painting was
communicable to all since its appeal was made to the eye. While the
painter proceeded at once to the imitation of nature, the poet's
instruments were words which varied in every land. He took the
Platonic view of poetry as a lying imitation, removed from truth. He
called the poet a collector of other men's wares, who decked himself in
their plumage. Where poetry presented only a shadow to the
imagination, painting offered a real image to the eye; and the eye, as
the window of the soul through which all earthly beauty was revealed,
the sight, he exclaimed, which had discovered navigation, which had
impelled men to seek the West, was the noblest of all the senses.
Painting spoke only by what it accomplished, poetry ended in the very
words with which it sang its own praises. If, then, poets called
painting dumb poetry, he could retort by dubbing poetry blind painting.
In common with his successors, Leonardo could not escape from this
fallacy, which, in overlooking all save descriptive verse, was destined
to burden aesthetic until demolished by Lessing.
It was the opinion of Leonardo that the temporary nature of music
caused its inferiority to painting. Although durability was in itself
no absolute test,--else the work of coppersmiths would be the highest
art,--yet in any final scale, permanence could not altogether be
disregarded. Music perished in the very act of its creation, {xviii}
while painting preserved the beautiful from the hand of time. "Helen
of Troy, gazing in a mirror, in her old age, wondered how she had twice
been ravished." Mortal beauty would thus vanish, if it were not
rescued by art from destroying age and death.
Leonardo contrasted painting with sculpture, for he had practised both,
and thought himself peculiarly qualified to judge their merit. He
considered the former the nobler art of the two, for sculpture involved
bodily toil and fatigue, while by its very nature it lacked perspective
and atmosphere, colour, and the feeling of space. Painting, on the
other hand, caused by an illusion, was in itself the result of deeper
thought. An even broader test served to convince him of its final
superiority. That art was of highest excellence, he wrote, which
possessed most elements of variety and universality. Painting
contained and reproduced all forms of nature; it made its appeal by the
harmonious balance of parts which gratified all the senses. By its
very duality it fulfilled the highest purpose. The painter was able to
visualize the beauty which enchanted him, to bring to reality the fancy
of his dreams, and give outward expression to the ideal within.
The genius of Leonardo as a painter came through unfolding the mystery
of life. Like Miranda, he had gazed with wonder at the beauty of the
world. "Look at the grace and sweetness {xix} of men and women in the
street," he wrote. The most ordinary functions of life and nature
amazed him most. He observed of the eye how in it form and colour, and
the entire universe it reflected, were reduced to a single point.
"Wonderful law of nature, which forced all effects to participate with
their cause in the mind of man. These are the true miracles!"
Elsewhere he wrote again: "Nature is full of infinite reasons which
have not yet passed into experience." He conceived it to be the
painter's duty not only to comment on natural phenomena as restrained
by law, but to merge his very mind into that of nature by interpreting
its relation with art. Resting securely on the reality of experienced
truth, he felt the deeper presence of the unreal on every side. In the
same way that he visualized the inner workings of the mind, his keen
imagination aided him to make outward trifles serve his desire to find
mysterious beauty everywhere. Oftentimes, in gazing on some ancient,
time-stained wall, he describes how he would trace thereon landscapes,
with mountains, rivers and valleys. The whole world was full of a
mystery to him, which his work reflected. The smile of consciousness,
pregnant of that which is beyond, illumines the expression of Mona
Lisa. So, too, in the strange glance of Ann, of John the Baptist, and
of the Virgin of the Rocks, one realizes that their thoughts dwell in
another world.
{xx}
Leonardo had found a refuge in art from the pettiness of material
environment. Like his own creations, he, too, had learned the secret
of the inner life. The painter, he wrote, could create a world of his
own, and take refuge in this new realm. But it must not be one of
shadows only. The very mystery he felt so keenly had yet to rest on a
real foundation; to treat it otherwise would be to plunge into mere
vapouring. Although attempting to bridge the gulf which separated the
real from the unreal, he refused to treat the latter supernaturally.
That mystery which lesser minds found in the occult, he saw in nature
all about him. He denied the existence of spirits, just as he urged
the foolishness of the will-o'-the-wisps of former ages,--alchemy and
the black art. In one sentence he destroyed the pretensions of
palmistry. "You will see," he wrote, "great armies slaughtered in an
hour's time, where in each individual the signs of the hands are
different."
His art took, thus, its guidance in realism, its purpose in
spirituality. The search for truth and the desire for beauty were the
twin ideals he strove to attain. The keenness of this pursuit saved
him from the blemish of egoism which aloofness from his surroundings
would otherwise have forced upon him. For his character presented the
anomaly, peculiar to the Renaissance, of a lofty idealism coupled in
action with {xxi} irresponsibility of duty. He stood on a higher
plane, his attitude toward life recognizing no claims on the part of
his fellowmen. In his desire to surpass himself, fostered by this
isolation of spirit and spurred on by the eager wish to attain
universal knowledge, he has been compared to Faust; but the likeness is
only half correct. He was not blind to the limitations which
encompassed him, his very genius making him realize their bounds. Of
the ancients he said that in attempting to define the nature of the
soul, they sought the impossible. He wrote elsewhere, "It is the
infinite alone that cannot be attained, for if it could it would become
finite."
In Leonardo's personality was reflected both the strength and weakness
of Renaissance Italy. So, to know him, it is necessary to understand
the Italy of that age. Its brilliancy, its universality, its desire
for beauty, are but one side of the medal. On its reverse, Italy
lacked the solid vigour of a national purpose. The discord of
political disunion, reacting on art, laid bare great weakness in the
want of any constructive direction, toward which the strength of the
Renaissance could aim. The energy was there, whether finding an outlet
in statecraft or in discovery, in art or in letters. But it laboured
for no common end; there was internal unity of force and method, but
external divergence of purpose. The tyranny of petty despots could
provide no adequate ideal toward {xxii} which to aim. No ruler, and no
city save Venice, could long symbolize the nation's patriotism.
Venetian painters alone glorified the state in their work, and thus
felt the living force of a national ambition which raised them above
themselves. But elsewhere there was little to inspire that devotion
for a common country necessary as a background to sustain the greatest
work. Hence Italian art, so living within certain limits, remained
stunted beyond these. The conviction that art existed in order to
express ideal beauty, that its main purpose was to please the eye and
the senses in spite of the result attained, proved inadequate
compensation for all that had been withdrawn. The art ideal tended
more and more to become a conscience and a purpose in itself, an inward
impulse for action and an outward goal.
The artist's real greatness will depend at all times on his qualities
as a representative. His true merit will arise from giving expression
in ideal terms to his nation and to his age. In so far as he has been
able to do this and the spirit of his country is reflected in his work,
in so far as he has represented what is best therein and most enduring,
he will have achieved greatness. Not that this is always, or even
often, a conscious expression. It is unfair reading to search for deep
thought in the work of either painter or poet. Neither art {xxiii}
offers the best medium to convey the abstractions of the mind, since
each has its own method of expression, independent of pure reason. But
painter and poet, in the degree they attain greatness, express more
than themselves. Ariosto, intent only to amuse, reflects with playful
wit and skepticism the splendid luxury and joy of living in Renaissance
court life. The care with which he chiselled each line proves that his
real seriousness and conscience lay in his artistic purpose. Without
Ariosto's wit, Paolo Veronese depicted a similar side in painting,
though his Venetian birthright made him celebrate the glory of the
Republic. Poet and painter alike expressed far more than either could
know. If such a test be applied to the artists of the Renaissance,
each in turn will respond to it,--just as the weakness of the later
Bolognese as a school is that, beyond a certain technical merit, they
meant and represented so little. But the noblest
painters,--Michelangelo and Raphael, Titian and Leonardo,--in addition
to possessing the solid grasp of technical mastery, reflected some
aspect of their nation's life and civilization. In Michelangelo was
realized the grandeur of Italy struggling vainly against crushing
oppression. He expressed that which was highest in it, reflecting the
loftiest side of its idealism mingled with deep pessimism in his survey
over life; for, wrapped in austerity, he saw mankind in heroic terms of
sadness. Raphael, on the {xxiv} other hand, found only beautiful
sweetness everywhere. The tragedies of life failed to touch the young
painter, who blotted from view all struggle and sorrow, and, in spite
of the misery which had befallen his nation, could still rejoice in the
sensuous beauty of the world. There was another side to the
Renaissance, dependent neither on beauty nor heroic grandeur, yet
sharing in both through qualities of its own. Titian, who painted the
living man of action, the man of parts, susceptible alike to the
appreciation of ideal beauty and heroic impulse, but guided withal by
expediency, reflected this more practical aspect of life. In his
portraiture he expressed the statecraft for which Italians found
opportunity beyond the Alps, since in Italy it was denied them; and
Titian found even Venice too narrow for the scope of his art.
But before Titian, before Raphael, before Michelangelo, Leonardo
reflected the rationalism and the mystery, the subtlety and the
philosophical speculation, of the age. To find in his work only the
individual thought of genius would be to mistake, perhaps, its most
important side; for the expression of his mind, both by its brilliancy
and its limitations, is typical of the spirit of his time. The Italian
Renaissance was reflected in him as rarely a period has been expressed
in the life-work of a single man. He represented its union of practice
and theory, of thought placed in the {xxv} service of action. He
summed up its different aspects in his own individuality.
Intellectually, he represented its many-sidedness attained through
penetration of thought, and a keenness of observation, profiting from
experience, extended into every sphere. As an artist he possessed a
vigour of imagination from which sprang his power of creating beauty.
But, in spite of his practical nature, he remained a dreamer in an age
which had in it more of stern reality than of golden dreams. His very
limitations, his excess of individualism, his want of long-continued
concentration, his lack of patriotism, his feeling of the superiority
of art to nationality, are all characteristic of Renaissance Italy.
The union in Leonardo of reality to mystery has often been shared by
genius in other fields. His own peculiar greatness sprang from
expressing in art the apparent contradiction of attaining the world of
mystery through force of reality. Like Hamlet, it was the union of the
real with the unreal which appealed to him, of the world as he saw it
and the world as he imagined it to be. It was but another expression
of the eternal ideal of truth and beauty.
L. E.
American Embassy
London, 1906
{3}
I
THOUGHTS ON LIFE
* *
*
[Sidenote: Of the Works of Leonardo]
Begun at Florence in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli, on the 22d
day of March, 1508; and this is to be a collection without order, taken
from many papers which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them
later, each in its place, according to the various subjects treated.
And I think that before I shall have finished this work, it will be
necessary for me to repeat the same thing many times over; so, O
reader, blame me not, because the subjects are many, and memory cannot
retain them and say: This I will not write because I have already
written it; and if I did not wish to fall into this error it would be
necessary, every time that I wished to copy something, in order not to
repeat myself, to read over all the preceding matter, all the more so
since the intervals are long between one time of writing and another.
[Sidenote: His Thirst after Knowledge]
2.
Not louder does the tempestuous sea bellow when the north wind strikes
its foaming waves between Scylla and Charybdis; nor Stromboli nor Mount
Etna when the sulphurous flames, {4} shattering and bursting open the
great mountain with violence, hurl stones and earth through the air
with the flame it vomits; nor when the fiery caverns of Mount Etna,
spitting forth the element which it cannot restrain, hurl it back to
the place whence it issued, driving furiously before it any obstacle in
the way of its vehement fury ... so I, urged by my great desire and
longing to see the blending of strange and various shapes made by
creating nature, wandered for some time among the dark rocks, and came
to the entrance of a great cave, in front of which I long stood in
astonishment and ignorance of such a thing. I bent my back into an
arch and rested my left hand on my knee, and with my right hand shaded
my downcast eyes and contracted eyebrows. I bent down first on one
side and then on the other to see whether I could perceive anything,
but the thick darkness rendered this impossible; and after having
remained there some time, two things arose within me, fear and
desire,--fear of the dark and threatening cave, desire to see whether
there were anything marvellous within.
3.
I discover for man the origin of the first and perhaps of the second
cause of his being.
[Sidenote: Leonardo's Studies]
4.
Recognizing as I do that I cannot make use of {5} subject matter which
is useful and delightful, since my predecessors have exhausted the
useful and necessary themes, I shall do as the man who by reason of his
poverty arrives last at the fair, and cannot do otherwise than purchase
what has already been seen by others and not accepted, but rejected by
them as being of little value. I shall place this despised and
rejected merchandise, which remains over after many have bought, on my
poor pack, and I shall go and distribute it, not in the big cities, but
in the poor towns, and take such reward as my goods deserve.
[Sidenote: Vain Knowledge]
5.
All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to
life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical
part.
6.
Avoid studies the result of which will die together with him who
studied.
[Sidenote: Value of Knowledge]
7.
The intellect will always profit by the acquisition of any knowledge
whatsoever, for thus what is useless will be expelled from it, and what
is fruitful will remain. It is impossible either to hate or to love a
thing without first acquiring knowledge of it.
{6}
8.
Men of worth naturally desire knowledge.
9.
It is ordained that to the ambitious, who derive no satisfaction from
the gifts of life and the beauty of the world, life shall be a cause of
suffering, and they shall possess neither the profit nor the beauty of
the world.
[Sidenote: On his Contemners]
10.
I know that many will say that this work is useless, and these are they
of whom Demetrius said recked no more of the breath which made the
words proceed from their mouth, than of the wind which proceeded from
their body,--men who seek solely after riches and bodily satisfaction,
men entirely denuded of that wisdom which is the food and verily the
wealth of the soul; because insomuch as the soul is of greater value
than the body, so much greater are the riches of the soul than those of
the body. And often when I see one of these take this work in his
hand, I wonder whether, like a monkey, he will not smell it and ask me
if it is something to eat.
[Sidenote: On the Vulgar]
11.
Demetrius used to say that there was no difference between the words
and the voice of the {7} unskilled ignorant and the sounds and noises
of a stomach full of superfluous wind. And it was not without reason
that he said this, for he considered it to be indifferent whence the
utterance of such men proceeded, whether from their mouth or their
body; both being of the same substance and value.
12.
I do not consider that men of coarse and boorish habits and of slender
parts deserve so fine an instrument nor such a complicated mechanism as
men of contemplation and high culture. They merely need a sack in
which their food may be held and whence it may issue, since verily they
cannot be considered otherwise than as vehicles for food, for they seem
to me to have nothing in common with the human race save the shape and
the voice; as far as the rest is concerned they are lower than the
beasts.
13.
Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament
and food of the mind of man.
[Sidenote: Knowledge the supreme Good]
14.
Cornelius Celsus: Knowledge is the supreme good, the supreme evil is
physical pain. We are composed of two separate parts, the soul and the
the body; the soul is the greater of these two, the body the lesser.
Knowledge appertains to the {8} greater part, the supreme evil belongs
to the lesser and baser part. Knowledge is an excellent thing for the
mind, and pain is the most grievous thing for the body. Just as the
supreme evil is physical pain, so is wisdom the supreme good of the
soul, that is to say of the wise man, and no other thing can be
compared with it.
[Sidenote: Life and Wisdom]
15.
In the days of thy youth seek to obtain that which shall compensate the
losses of thy old age. And if thou understandest that old age is fed
with wisdom, so conduct thyself in the days of thy youth that
sustenance may not be lacking to thy old age.
[Sidenote: Praise of Knowledge]
16.
The fame of the rich man dies with him; the fame of the treasure, and
not of the man who possessed it, remains. Far greater is the glory of
the virtue of mortals than that of their riches. How many emperors and
how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and
they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame
might be ever-lasting. How many were those who lived in scarcity of
worldly goods in order to grow rich in virtue; and as far as virtue
exceeds wealth, even in the same degree the desire of the poor man
proved more fruitful than that of the rich man. {9} Dost thou not see
that wealth in itself confers no honour on him who amasses it, which
shall last when he is dead, as does knowledge?--knowledge which shall
always bear witness like a clarion to its creator, since knowledge is
the daughter of its creator, and not the stepdaughter, like wealth.
[Sidenote: The World]
17.
Bountiful nature has provided that in all parts of the world you will
find something to imitate.
18.
[Sidenote: The Beauty of Life]
Consider in the streets at nightfall the faces of men and women when it
is bad weather, what grace and sweetness they manifest!
19.
Just as iron which is not used grows rusty, and water putrefies and
freezes in the cold, so the mind of which no use is made is spoilt.
[Sidenote: Fruitless Study]
20.
Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does
study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it
absorbs.
21.
Truth was the only daughter of time.
{10}
[Sidenote: In Praise of Truth]
22.
So vile a thing is a lie that even if it spoke fairly of God it would
take away somewhat from His divinity; and so excellent a thing is truth
that if it praises the humblest things they are exalted. There is no
doubt that truth is to falsehood as light is to darkness; and so
excellent a thing is truth that even when it touches humble and lowly
matters, it still incomparably exceeds the uncertainty and falsehood in
which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if
falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this,
truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects, though not
of disorderly minds. But thou who feedest on dreams dost prefer the
sophistry and subterfuges in matters of importance and uncertainty to
what is certain and natural, though of lesser magnitude.
23.
Obstacles in the way of truth are finally punished.
[Sidenote: Versus Humanists]
24.
I am well aware that not being a literary man the presumptuous will
think that they have the right to blame me on the ground that I am not
a man of letters. Vainglorious people! Know they not that I could
make answer as Marius did to the Roman people, and say: They who make a
{11} display with the labours of others will not allow me mine? They
will say that being unskilled in letters I cannot find true expression
for the matters of which I desire to treat; they do not know that in my
subjects experience is a truer guide than the words of others, for
experience was the teacher of all great writers, and therefore I take
her for guide, and I will cite her in all cases.
25.
Although I may not be able to quote other authors, as they do, I can
quote from a greater and more worthy source, namely, experience,--the
teacher of their masters. They go about swelled with pride and
pomposity, dressed up and bedight, not with their own labour, but with
that of others; and they will not concede me mine. And if they despise
me, who am a creator, far more are they, who do not create but trumpet
abroad and exploit the works of other men, to be blamed.
[Sidenote: Authority]
26.
He who in reasoning cites authority is making use of his memory rather
than of his intellect.
[Sidenote: On Commentators]
27.
Men who are creators and interpreters of nature to man, in comparison
with boasters and exploiters of the works of others, must be judged
{12} and esteemed like the object before the mirror as compared with
its image reflected in the mirror.--one being something in itself, and
the other nothing. Little to nature do they owe, since it is merely by
chance they wear the human form, and but for it I might include them
with herds of cattle.
28.
A well lettered man is so because he is well natured, and just as the
cause is more admirable than the effect, so is a good disposition,
unlettered, more praiseworthy than a well lettered man who is without
natural disposition.
29.
Against certain commentators who disparage the inventors of antiquity,
the originators of science and grammar, and who attack the creators of
antiquity; and because they through laziness and the convenience of
books have not been able to create, they attack their masters with
false reasoning.
30.
It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.
[Sidenote: Experience]
31.
Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
[Sidenote: Experience never Errs]
32.
Wrongly men complain of experience, which {13} with great railing they
accuse of falsehood. Leave experience alone, and turn your lamentation
to your ignorance, which leads you, with your vain and foolish desires,
to promise yourselves those things which are not in her power to
confer, and to accuse her of falsehood. Wrongly men complain of
innocent experience, when they accuse her not seldom of false and lying
demonstrations.
33.
Experience never errs; it is only your judgements that err, ye who look
to her for effects which our experiments cannot produce. Because given
a principle, that which ensues from it is necessarily the true
consequence of that principle, unless it be impeded. Should there,
however, be any obstacle, the effect which should ensue from the
aforesaid principle will participate in the impediment as much or as
little as the impediment is operative in regard to the aforesaid
principle.
34.
Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race,
teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of
necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm,
teaches her to act.
35.
All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.
{14}
[Sidenote: Origin of Knowledge]
36.
The sense ministers to the soul, and not the soul sense; and where the
sense which ministers ceases to serve the soul, all the functions of
that sense are lacking in life, as is evident in those who are born
dumb and blind.
[Sidenote: Testimony of the Senses]
37.
And if thou sayest that sight impedes the security and subtlety of
mental meditation, by reason of which we penetrate into divine
knowledge, and that this impediment drove a philosopher to deprive
himself of his sight, I answer that the eye, as lord of the senses,
performs its duty in being an impediment to the confusion and lies of
that which is not science but discourse, by which with much noise and
gesticulation argument is constantly conducted; and hearing should do
the same, feeling, as it does, the offence more keenly, because it
seeks after harmony which devolves on all the senses. And if this
philosopher deprived himself of his sight to get rid of the obstacle to
his discourses, consider that his discourses and his brain were a party
to the act, because the whole was madness. Now could he not have
closed his eyes when this frenzy came upon him, and have kept them
closed until the frenzy consumed itself? But the man was mad, the
discourse insane, and egregious the folly of destroying his eye-sight.
{15}
[Sidenote: Judgement prone to Error]
38.
There is nothing which deceives us as much as our own judgement.
39.
The greatest deception which men incur proceeds from their opinions.
40.
Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed
by experience.
[Sidenote: Intelligence of Animals]
41.
Man discourseth greatly, and his discourse is for the greater part
empty and false; the discourse of animals is small, but useful and
true: slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.
42.
What is an element? It is not in man's power to define the quiddity of
the elements, but a great many of their effects are known.
43.
That which is divisible in fact is divisible in potentiality also; but
not all quantities which are divisible in potentiality are divisible in
fact.
[Sidenote: Infinity incomprehensible]
44.
What is that thing which is not defined and would {16} not exist if it
were defined? It is infinity, which if it could be defined would be
limited and finite, because that which can be defined ends with the
limits of its circumference, and that which cannot be defined has no
limits.
45.
O contemplators of things, do not pride yourselves for knowing those
things which nature by herself and her ordination naturally conduces;
but rejoice in knowing the purposes of those things which are
determined by your mind.
[Sidenote: Insoluble Questions]
46.
Consider, O reader, how far we can lend credence to the ancients who
strove to define the soul and life,--things which cannot be proved;
while those things which can be clearly known and proved by experience
remained during so many centuries ignored and misrepresented! The eye,
which so clearly demonstrates its functions, has been up to my time
defined in one manner by countless authorities; I by experience have
discovered another definition.
[Sidenote: Beauty of Nature's Inventions]
47.
Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the
help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet
{17} will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple
or more practical than those of nature, because in her inventions there
is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous; and she makes use of no
counterpoise when she constructs the limbs of animals in such a way as
to correspond to the motion of their bodies, but she puts into them the
soul of the body. This is not the proper place for this discourse,
which belongs rather to the subject of the composition of animated
bodies; and the rest of the definition of the soul I leave to the minds
of the friars, the fathers of the people, who know all secrets by
inspiration. I leave the sacred books alone, because they are the
supreme truth.
[Sidenote: Completeness in Knowledge]
48.
Those who seek to abbreviate studies do injury to knowledge and to love
because the love of anything is the daughter of this knowledge. The
fervency of the love increases in proportion to the certainty of the
knowledge, and the certainty issues from a complete knowledge of all
the parts, which united compose the totality of the thing which ought
to be loved. Of what value, then, is he who abbreviates the details of
those matters of which he professes to render a complete account, while
he leaves behind the chief part of the things of which the whole is
composed? It is true that impatience, the mother of {18} stupidity,
praises brevity, as if such persons had not life long enough to enable
them to acquire a complete knowledge of one subject such as the human
body! And then they seek to comprehend the mind of God, in which the
universe is included, weighing it and splitting it into infinite
particles, as if they had to dissect it!
O human folly! dost thou not perceive that thou hast been with thyself
all thy life, and thou art not yet aware of the thing which more fully
than any other thing thou dost possess, namely, thy own folly? And
thou desirest with the multitude of sophists to deceive thyself and
others, despising the mathematical sciences in which truth dwells and
the knowledge of the things which they contain; and then thou dost busy
thyself with miracles, and writest that thou hast attained to the
knowledge of those things which the human mind cannot comprehend, which
cannot be proved by any instance in nature, and thou deemest that thou
hast wrought a miracle in spoiling the work of some speculative mind;
and thou perceivest not that thy error is the same as that of a man who
strips a plant of the ornament of its branches covered with leaves,
mingled with fragrant flowers and fruits. Just as Justinius did when
he abridged the stories written by Trogus Pompeius, who had written
elaborately the noble deeds of his forefathers, which were full of
wonderful beauties of style; and thus {19} he composed a barren work,
worthy only of the impatient spirits who deem that they are wasting the
time which they might usefully employ in studying the works of nature
and mortal affairs. But let such men remain in company with the
beasts; let dogs and other animals full of rapine be their courtiers,
and let them be accompanied with these running ever at their heels! and
let the harmless animals follow, which in the season of the snows come
to the houses begging alms as from their master.
[Sidenote: Nature]
49.
Nature is full of infinite causes which are beyond the pale of
experience.
50.
Nature in creating first gives size to the abode of the intellect (the
skull, the head), and then to the abode of the vital spirit (the chest).
[Sidenote: Law of Necessity]
51.
Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme
and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.
52.
When anything is the cause of any other thing, and brings about by its
movement any effect, {20} the movement of the effect necessarily
follows the movement of the cause.
[Sidenote: Of Lightning in the Clouds]
53.
O mighty and once living instrument of creative nature, unable to avail
thyself of thy great strength thou must needs abandon a life of
tranquillity and obey the law which God and time gave to Nature the
mother. Ah! how often the frighted shoals of dolphins and great tunny
fish were seen fleeing before thy inhuman wrath; whilst thou,
fulminating with swift beating of wings and twisted tail, raised in the
sea a sudden storm with buffeting and sinking of ships and tossing of
waves, filling the naked shores with terrified and distracted fishes.
[Sidenote: The Human Eye]
54.
Since the eye is the window of the soul, the soul is always fearful of
losing it, so much so that if a man is suddenly frightened by the
motion or an object before him, he does not with his hands protect his
heart, the source of all life; nor his head, where dwells the lord of
the senses; nor the organs of hearing, smell and taste. But as soon as
he feels fright it does not suffice him to close the lids of his eyes,
keeping them shut with all his might, but he instantly turns in the
opposite direction; and still not feeling secure he covers his eyes
with one hand, stretching out the {21} other to ward off the danger in
the direction in which he suspects it to lie. Nature again has
ordained that the eye of man shall close of itself, so that remaining
during his sleep without protection it shall suffer no hurt.
[Sidenote: Universal Law]
55.
Every object naturally seeks to maintain itself in itself.
56.
The part always tends to reunite with its whole in order to escape from
its imperfection; the soul desires to remain with its body, because
without the organic instruments of that body it can neither act nor
feel.
57.
The lover is moved by the object he loves as the senses are by sensible
things; and they unite and become one and the same. The work is the
first thing which is born of this union; if the thing loved is base,
the lover becomes base. When what is united is in harmony with that
which receives it, delight, pleasure and satisfaction ensue. When the
lover is united to the beloved he rests there; when the burden is laid
down it finds rest there.
58.
A natural action is accomplished in the briefest manner.
{22}
[Sidenote: Nature Variable and Infinite.]
59.
To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among
her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like
another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the
leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar
to another.
60.
If nature had made one rule for the quality of limbs, the faces of men
would resemble each other to such a degree that it would not be
possible to distinguish one from the other; but she has varied the five
features of the face in such a way that, although she has made an
almost universal rule with regard to their size, she has not done so
with regard to their quality, so that each one can be clearly
distinguished from the other.
61.
It is an easy matter for him who knows man to arrive at universal
knowledge, since all terrestrial animals are similar in regard to their
structure, that is to say, in regard to the muscles and bones, and they
do not vary save in height and thickness; then there are the aquatic
animals, and I will not persuade the painter that any rule can be made
with regard to these because they are of infinite variety--so are the
insects.
{23}
62.
The body of anything which is fed is continually dying and being
reborn, since nourishment cannot enter save where the past nourishment
is exhausted; and if it is exhausted, it no longer has life, and if you
do not furnish it with nourishment equal to that which has been before,
you will impair the health of the organism, and if you deprive it of
this nourishment, life will be altogether destroyed. But if you supply
it with so much as can be consumed in a day, then as much life will be
restored as was consumed, like the light of the candle which is
furnished to it by the fuel provided by the moisture of the candle, and
this light with most speedy succour restores beneath what is consumed
above as it dies in dusky smoke; and this death is continuous, likewise
the continuity of the smoke is equal to the continuity of the fuel; and
in the same moment the light dies and is born again together with the
movement of its fuel.
63.
Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of
animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the
death of others.
[Sidenote: Light]
64.