HEADER: ANALYTICAL DISCOURSE.

ANALYSIS BY ROBERT FLUDD.

In a clearly similar way, I would have gladly ended this treatise of mine, leaving out the Appendix, were it not that a civil respect for my friends commanded me to grant them a similar favor, and to satisfy them in many places concerning the comparison between John’s [Kepler's] Harmony and my own (where he seems sharply, though secretly, to accuse me of some sort of ignorance). Furthermore, an honest necessity to defend my good reputation urged me on. Therefore, I have proposed to examine how much sympathy there is between our Harmonies, and how much antipathy—which he himself seems to treat in the following sections—by following his tracks step-by-step, lightly touching upon the marrow of this subject, yet probing it to the very core.

Text II.

This section quotes Johannes Kepler’s Appendix to Harmonices Mundi (1619), which Fludd is now rebutting.

That author [Fludd] promised two volumes, one of which, titled "On the Macrocosm," The "Macrocosm" refers to the universe as a whole. now sees the light; the other, "On the Microcosm," The "Microcosm" refers to man as a reflection of the universe. is still awaited. The first volume, comprising two treatises, appeared at distinct times: for I saw the first treatise, "On the Threefold World," after the Frankfurt autumn fair of the year 1617; the second, "On the Arts which he calls the Apes of Nature," at the Easter fair of the following year, 1618.

ANALYSIS.

Those two divided offspring of my first volume were not published sequentially because they had not both been fully written before the year 1617; on the contrary, I would have the reader know that the subject of that first volume was completed and brought to a happy conclusion seven years before its public promulgation. Nor did one portion reach the printer’s hands without the other; but it was in his mind (as it seemed to me), whether for the sake of greater profit or compelled by the constraints of time, to publish one part of the same volume after the other—that is, at successive fairs.

As for the first volume of my Microcosm, which deals with the same matter according to both nature and art, I certainly did not require a twenty-two-year interval for its complete composition—an amount of time which Johannes Kepler confesses he took to complete his Harmony. Rather, I began that work in 1618 around the feast of St. Michael September 29th, and by my nocturnal studies alone—with no hindrance bothering me in my daily profession and medical practice, but with peaceful contemplation accompanying me—I successfully finished it before Lent of that same year.

Therefore, let readers—borne aloft on the wings of justice—forgive me if, in such a rapid accumulation of great matters, significant errors perhaps crept into our work as I swiftly passed over arguments of great weight, or if it is otherwise not as exact in its method or as purged of faults as that work of Johannes Kepler, which was revised again and again over so much time, and examined and refined with so much "cementing" and "fermentation." For things rendered in an uncorrected age are later made most correct; raw things are made ripe, and imperfect things are led completely to the goal of perfection.

Nevertheless, I hope that I have produced nothing in the history of either the Macrocosm or the Microcosm that I am not capable of supporting on "Atlantean shoulders" A reference to the Titan Atlas who held up the sky; Fludd means he can carry the weight of his arguments and defending in public writings against anyone's opposition. For I do not doubt that almost everything said by me is proved to be right and sincere in those same works of mine—partly by arguments of solid philosophy (insofar as it does not lack the certain supports of experience), partly by the authority of the ancient Philosophers and the confirmation of the "Theophores" God-bearers or divinely inspired writers, and finally (which is the most certain of all) by the testimonies of ocular demonstrations and various experiences.

Text III.

In the second treatise, therefore, he placed Music among the arts, covering to some extent the material of my third book; but in the first treatise, which is completed in seven books, he destined the third book for "World Music," usurping the same title that I prefixed to my entire work: he touched indeed upon the material of my fourth and fifth books.

ANALYSIS.

Here the author acts backward, counting the tail before making any mention of the head; he introduces my "artificial music" Music as a human craft/performance where I was treating it only for natural and physical rea-