The Preface. (2)

HAVING bin about nine months, som say in a disease, I in a cure, I have bin the wonder of physicians, and they mine; not but that we might have bin reconcil’d, for books (I grant) if they keep close to nature, must be good ones, but I deny that nature is bound to books. I am no study’d naturalist, having long since given over that philosophy as inscrutable and incertain: for thus I thought with myself; “Nature, to whom it is given to work as it were under a veil or behind the curtain, is the art of God: now if there be arts of men who have wrought openly enough to the understanding (for example that of Titian) nevertheless whose excellency I shall never reach; how shall I thus, sticking in the bark at the arts of men, be able to look thence to the roots, or dive into the abyss of things in the art of God?” And nevertheless, Si placidum caput undis extulerit, should Nature afford me a sight of her, I do not think so meanly of myself but that I would know her as soon as another, tho more learned man. Laying therfore arts wholly, and books almost all aside, I shall truly deliver to the world how I felt and saw Nature; that is, how she came first into my senses, and by the senses into the understanding. Yet for the sake of my readers, and also for my own, I must invert the order of my discourse; for theirs, because, till I can speak to men that have had the same sensations with myself, I must speak to such as have a like understanding with others: for my own, because, being like in this discourse to be the monky that play’d at chess with his master, I have need of som cushion on my head, that being in all I have spoken hitherto more laid at than my reason. My discourse then is to consist of two parts: the first, in which I appeal to his understanding who will use his reason, is a platform of nature drawn out into certain aphorisms; and the second, in which I shall appeal to his senses who in a disease very common will make farther trial, is a narrative of my case.