revelation. These are the three channels through which knowledge comes to us, and error will cease if the balance between them be preserved.”
For a moment Comenius seems to lay more stress on the materialistic side, and tells us that “Universal Wisdom” should reduce all things to number, measure, and weight; a process of meting out nature with a footrule for which he dutifully finds authority in Scripture (Wisdom ii. 20).[1] But he soon recedes from the commonplace conception of accurate measurements. Bacon, he says, seems to have discovered the necessary method of separating the true from the false by his system of “artificial induction”; but this process takes too long, requiring generations of effort, and, besides, it is useless for the construction of Pansophia, since it deals only with natural phenomena, while Pansophia treats of the whole universe.[2]
Very different are the laws or norms by which universal knowledge is to be obtained, and these Comenius proceeds to enunciate in eighteen aphorisms:—
1. Universal knowledge, so far as it can be obtained by man, has as its objects God, nature, and art.
2. A perfect knowledge of these three is to be sought.
3. The knowledge of things is perfect when it is full, true, and ordered.
4. Knowledge is true when things are apprehended as they exist in reality.
5. Things are apprehended in their essential nature when the manner in which they have come into existence is understood.
6. Each object comes into existence in accordance with its “idea,” that is to say, in relation to a certain rational conception through which it can be what it is.
7. Therefore, all things that come into existence, whether they are the works of God, of nature, or of man, do so in accordance with their “ideas.”
8. Art borrows the “ideas” of its productions from nature, nature from God, and God from Himself.
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