Physiologia Kircheriana Experimentalis

Ornate woodcut initial F featuring floral and foliate motifs.

It is necessary to flee that foul gloom of shadows into which the sun, with the diffused sprinkling of its rays, is accustomed to creep only by stealth; there is no place here for the barren impression of a fawning, sycophantic mind, which knows not its own exit where a living demonstration triumphs in its own clarity. Wisdom would be in vain, nor would antiquity have adorned its origin from the head of Jove with fables, if it were to lie hidden in those most secret recesses where the skill of the human mind, investigating in a concentrated manner—whether to educate mortality or to mark those paths which our labors incessantly tread—cannot exercise the power of its own strengths. We ought to admire those notions which, before they are well perceived, play among the shadows in the way that lights are accustomed to shine more brightly amid darkness. Truly, that adage, accepted only among the vulgar and the vain critics of skeptical philosophy, seems discordant to me: The world is ruled by opinion, when there is nothing in the world so divergent from our cognition that it may not be brought to the light of truth by most evident reason; nor are the causes of things hidden, when the infallible prelude of effects brings them forth into certainty. Cognitions of things can indeed be pressed by darkness due to our own weakness, but truth always breaks forth, which continuous labor stimulates, and, in a way, forgetful of itself, it does not fail to adorn itself by its own strength—just like a diamond, which previously lay ignobly and obscurely hidden in the hollows of the earth, to which the hand of the craftsman is soon applied: it which before was dull with a raw and filthy opacity, now sparkles with its own translucent value. Juices and flavor-filled fruits, produced from their hidden places through their natural or artificial windings, ennoble their origin; unsightly roots, when they obtain a proper place for generation, bring forth such things that both delight and profit. Wool, before it becomes purple, is stained with many impurities, yet once imbued with the elaborate Tyrian murex—that which was despised and of no use, having been purged of filth through industry and labor, now glories upon kings.

Hence it is that I easily persuade myself that the great ruminators of nature are led by previous labor and experience, and not by pure and simple opinion, to verify those things which could not have been known except through diligent and faithful experience; and since this is the mistress of all things and of providence, it teaches us clearly that those whom this guide does not approve as her disciples are those who busy themselves with opinion alone. For what does it profit to revolve the heights of things by the most abstruse speculations alone, producing no real effect; to build imaginary machines through the air, to prop up all arguments with power while doing nothing in act, to gape at false opinions, following no practice, method, or application? Ovid says:

The hunter well knows where to stretch his nets for the deer,
He knows well in what valley the gnashing boar may linger.
To bird-catchers the bushes are known that hold the hooks,
He knows which waters teem with many a fish.

But whence this? Perhaps from fantastic imaginations, from blind investigation or study, scrutinized privately at home by the fireside? By no means.

Experience has made art through various uses,
With example showing the way.

The prodigious miracle of our century, the Very Reverend Father Athanasius Kircher, has striven for more than fifty years with tireless labor to enter this path, so laudable and so salutary; because of the countless experiments upon which he founded all his sciences, he has seized the whole world into admiration and benevolence toward him. And he has moved me to this counsel and study: that I might undertake to collect into one work, for the public light and the common utility of all who philosophize, the mysteries and arcana of nature, scattered here and there throughout his vast works, so that all may feel how nobly those things which are hidden lie open, if some divine mind—such as that which so great a man possesses—approaches them, either to adorn them or to rescue them from sloth.

Here, let the ignorance of those—who think the human mind is impervious to eminent cognitions—lie suppressed, led and accompanied on our journey by so great a man, for those whom

He gave to man a lofty face, and ordered him to look at the sky,
And to raise his uplifted gaze to the stars,

Not...