a glimpse of their
nature, as light in the sun and elements. We style it a bare accident,
but where it subsists alone it is a spiritual substance, and may be an
angel: in brief, conceive light invisible, and that is a spirit.

I could never pass that sentence of Paracelsus, without an asterisk, or
annotation; _Ascendens constellatum multa revelat, quaerentibus magnalia
naturae_, i.e. _opera Dei_. I do think that many mysteries ascribed to
our own inventions have been the courteous revelations of spirits; for
those noble essences in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow-
nature on earth; and therefore believe that those many prodigies and
ominous prognostics which forerun the ruins of states, princes, and
private persons are the charitable premonitions of good angels, which
more careless inquiries term but the effects of chance and nature.

ON MAN

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