according to the opinion of the Philosopher in the third book of the
Ethics, that man is worthy of praise or of blame only in those things
which it is in his power to do or not to do; but in those things over
which he has no power he deserves neither blame nor praise, since
either the praise or blame is to be attributed to some other, although
the things may be parts of the man himself. Therefore, we ought not to
blame the man because his body, from his birth, may be ugly, since it
was not in his power to make it beautiful; but our blame should fall
on the evil disposition of the matter whereof he is made, whose source
was a defect of Nature. And even so we ought not to praise the man for
the beauty of form which he may have from his birth, for he was not
the maker of it; but we ought to praise the artificer, that is, Human
Nature, who shapes her material into so much beauty when she is not
impeded. And therefore the priest said well to the Emperor who laughed
and scoffed at the ugliness of his body: "The Lord, He is God: It is
He that hath made us, and not we ourselves;" and these are the words
of the Prophet in a verse of the Psalms, written neither more nor less
than according to the reply of the Priest.

And therefore let the wicked evil-born ones perceive that, if they put
their chief care in the adornment of their persons, it must be with
all modesty; for to do that is no other than to adorn the work of
another, that is, Nature, and to abandon their own proper work.

Returning, then, to the proposition, I say that our intellect, through
defect of the power through which it sees organic power, that is, the
imagination, is not able to ascend to certain things, because the
imagination cannot help it and has not the wherewithal, such as are
the substances apart from matter, which (if we can have any knowledge
of them) we cannot fully comprehend.