On Animals (De Animalibus)

by what things they are affected, what customs they are endowed with, how great a span of life is given to each. How great the magnitude of the body—what is the greatest, what the smallest; what the form, what the color, what the voice, what the temperaments, what the functions; finally, it omits nothing that nature brings forth, nourishes, increases, and protects in the genus of animals. All of which look to this: that we may understand and admire and worship the immortal God, upon whom nature itself depends—as that most holy author himself, whom God had chosen as a kind of precious furniture for Himself, admonishes—from those things which proceed from nature. Than which, nothing can be more beautiful, nothing more grave, nothing more worthy for man. Such is the fruit of these books. Nor are those to be listened to who say, "Aristotle says much about the fly, about the little bee, about the little worm, but little about God." For he treats very much about God who declares the Creator Himself by the most exquisite doctrine of created things. Nor indeed is the fly or the little worm to be omitted where the wondrous skill of nature is in question. For just as the genius of any craftsman, so the genius of nature is to be contemplated rather in the most minute things. Moreover, since to know the causes of things is most beautiful—for by this one cognition man can be perfected and rendered complete, so that he may turn out as similar to the immortal God as it is possible for him to be—in these books we are taught fully why each thing in the genus of animals is so, and we clearly attain that more noble happiness which consists in the action of the mind, which also the wise poet, praising it, says: "Happy is he who could know the causes of things." What shall I say of the soul, concerning which there is so much public and private debate? Nowhere in his books does this philosopher expose his opinion as openly as in these books: what the soul is and whence it is received into the body. In addition to these, those customs and offices of the virtues by which we call a man good and pursue him with praise can be learned far better from here than either from the rhetorician whom the Greeks call a sophist, or from the preacher—a name now trite to Latin ears. For in them, life often differs from their precepts, and they exhort others better than they themselves perform their duty, so that