We are only that
amphibious piece, between a corporeal and a spiritual
essence; that middle form, that links those two to-
gether, and makes good the method of God and nature,
that jumps not from extremes, but unites the incom-
patible distances by some middle and participating
natures. That we are the breath and similitude of God,
it is indisputable, and upon record of Holy Scripture:
but to call ourselves a microcosm, or little world, I
thought it only a pleasant trope of rhetorick, till my
near judgment and second thoughts told me there was
a real truth therein. For, first we are a rude mass, and
in the rank of creatures which only are, and have a dull
kind of being, not yet privileged with life, or preferred
to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the
life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of
spirits: running on, in one mysterious nature, those five
kinds of existencies, which comprehend the creatures,
not only of the world, but of the universe. Thus is
man that great and true
amphibium, whose nature is
disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers
elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds; for
though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason,
the one visible, the other invisible; whereof Moses
seems to have left description, and of the other so
obscurely, that some parts thereof are yet in controversy.
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