Philosophical Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Vol. 1

That no man of a slightly more elevated mind, who had turned his attention to exploring the nature of things, existed during the span of time I have indicated without devoting his labor to examining these books, can be proven by the long series of excellent men of every age who were students of these questions. If the remarkable wealth of manuscript codices did not teach this, it could be best gathered from the many and great examples of praise and commemorations with which the volumes of writers on rural affairs who wrote after him, as well as the rest of the learned men of an older age—which even now are handled by our hands—are filled. It may be permitted to mention a few from many. For they serve as documentation: Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Vincent of Beauvais, John of Salisbury, Robert Boyle, and others, by whom we see these questions frequently cited or used. Nor, however, is the study of these questions not to be recommended to men of our own age who are skilled in physics and lovers of it, since there are many exquisite observations in them, both those that are true, and others which, while they do not always respond to the truth, are nevertheless so constituted that they lead to the truth and can generate other and excellent thoughts. Nor, indeed, have there been lacking in our own times excellent men among the students of nature who recognized and openly professed the virtues of these questions: among whom it suffices to have named Kastner and Lichtenberg, recently the ornaments and lights of Göttingen.

Therefore, it can be proclaimed that the labor Seneca put into compiling these books, and the purpose he followed, succeeded admirably. For just as he confessed more than once that he composed all his books so that he might benefit his fellow citizens and posterity, so it is clear that he elaborated and published the Natural Questions in particular with this same purpose. The utility redounding to human life from this investigation and contemplation of nature seemed to him so great and so wonderful that, from the very first years of his youth, he showed himself so devoted to the Stoic sect—which he seems at least not to have repudiated, if he did not follow it early on—that he embraced even this part of philosophy, especially loved and cultivated by the Stoics, with a sharp fervor of mind, and omitted nothing that belonged to this.