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