CONCERNING OCCULT PHILOSOPHY,

instructs us on how they differ and how they agree. From here, it produces its wonderful effects by joining the virtues of things through their application to one another, and to their suitable lower subjects, coupling and marrying the gifts and virtues of the superior things to the inferior ones everywhere. This most perfect and supreme science, this higher and holier philosophy, is finally the absolute completion of all the most noble philosophy. For since all regulated philosophy is divided into physics, mathematics, and theology: physics teaches the nature of those things which are in the world, and investigates and explores their causes, effects, times, places, modes, outcomes, integrities, and parts.

How many there are, what types of things are called elements,
What heat produces, what the earth, what the humid air,
What they generate: whence also the beginnings of the great sky,
Whence the flow of the sea, or the Iris The rainbow with its varied colors.
What makes the noisy clouds give back thunder:
Or whence the lightning bolt is hurled from the ethereal court.
What secrets the torches of the night the stars or meteors hold, what cause brings forth comets,
And what blind power shakes the swollen lands, what are the seeds of gold,
what the seeds of iron, and the whole clever force of latent nature.

Physics, the observer of natures, embraces all these things, and those things which Virgil sings:

Whence the race of men and cattle, at once the rain and fires,
Whence the tremor in the lands, by what force the deep seas swell
with their barriers broken, and again sink back into themselves.
The powers of herbs, the spirits and rages of wild beasts,
Every kind of shrub, and of stones and reptiles also.

Mathematics truly teaches us to know nature in its extension of three dimensions, and to observe the motion and progress of the celestial bodies.

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Whither the golden stars are carried by swift motion,
What now forces the darkening moon to grow dim,
And the sun to suffer eclipses with its light sent away.

And those things which Virgil sings:

For which reason, the golden sun rules the globe measured out
in certain parts through the twelve stars the Zodiac of the world:
It shows the paths of the sky, and points out the stars,
The various eclipses of the sun, and the labors of the moon,
Arcturus, the Pleiades, the Hyades, and the twin bears.
Why the winter suns hasten so much to dip themselves
in the ocean, or what delay stands in the way of the slow nights.

All of which are discerned through mathematics itself.
From here we can foreknow the storms in the doubtful sky,
From here the day of harvest, and the time for sowing,
And when to drive the treacherous marble original: "marmor"; a poetic term for the smooth, shining surface of the sea with oars.