First Physical Dissertation on the Bond Connecting Soul and Body

with industry before we proceed to the contemplation of superior spirits. For we are taught by nature herself to advance our step from those things which are closer to those that are further away. Hence, that is rightly called a true method of knowledge or a sober way of philosophizing which begins from us ourselves. When this is neglected, it happens that it is equally a cause for wonder and not a cause for wonder that our mind is so unknown to itself, when it is not a stranger to itself, but domestic; not alien, but proper. But as those who travel too long eventually become guests and strangers in their own fatherland, as DESCARTES says in Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting Reason, page 5; so, because our mind has traveled too long from an early age in corporeal things, it has remained unknown to itself, so that it seems to know external things better than its own domestic ones; so writes CLAUBERG in Exercises LXXIX on the Knowledge of God and Ourselves, page 383.

From those things, therefore, which have been said, let us conclude that the knowledge of the soul is, on one hand, most necessary, in that the way to it is opened by nature herself through the granted faculty of reflecting upon itself; and no less most useful, in that it presupposes knowledge of oneself in the easier investigation of other things. And regarding this latter point, let us embrace the very true dictum of the STAGIRITE original: "STAGIRITÆ", referring to Aristotle, with truth herself applauding, when, barely having made the first steps into the boundaries of the Treatise on the Soul, Book I, Chapter I, Vol. I, Works, page 379 (Edit. IS. CASAUB. Lyon 1590), he says: "It seems that the knowledge of it (namely, the soul) contributes greatly to all truth, but most especially to the knowledge of nature itself."

However, the body, because of the closer bond by which it is joined to the soul, seems, by reason of its dignity, to partake of some part of that dignity, and therefore to require of us an attention certainly not much less than that which the soul requires. And induced by this obligation toward ourselves, I undertake in the present to initiate a disquisition on both parts of us.