I - Nature and Tradition

Summary

Quemcunque aegrum ingenio praestantem curandum invisebat, siquidem morbi vehementia pateretur,… familiarem cum eo sermonem aliquandiu conferebat, cum philosophis Philosophica, cum Mathematicis Mathematica, cum ducibus ac militibus, de urbium situ, et fluviis eas alluentibus, deque instrumentis bellicis et eorum inventoribus; cum nautis de navigandi ratione et regionibus nuper repertis; cum Theologis de Deo.

Life of Jean Fernel, by Guillaume Plancy, published (1607) in the Univ. Medicina.

When consulted by some patient who was a man of parts he (Fernel), if the state of the case allowed, liked to get some talk with him; if it were a philosopher on philosophy, if a mathematician on mathematics, if a commander or a soldier on the site of towns, the rivers on which they were, and on engines of war and their inventors, if a seaman on navigation and newly discovered lands, if a theologian on God.

As to Natural Theology and what we are to understand by it, more than one well-known statement offers us counsel. Bolingbroke, type in his way of eighteenth-century culture, wrote to Alexander Pope, the poet, “What I understand by the first philosophy is ‘natural theology’, and I consider the constant contemplation of Nature, by which I mean the whole system of God's works as far as it lies open to us, as the common spring of all the sciences, and of that”, i.e. Natural Theology. The words in which the founder of these Lectures expressed his intention allow us to think Bolingbroke's statement might have satisfied him well.