ON FINAL CAUSE


There is but one first cause, and four second causes of all things; some
are without efficient, as God; others without matter, as angels; some
without form, as the first matter: but every essence, created or
uncreated, hath its final cause, and some positive end both of its
essence and operation; this is the cause I grope after in the works of
nature; on this hangs the providence of God. To raise so beauteous a
structure, as the world and the creatures thereof, was but His art; but
their sundry and divided operations, with their predestinated ends, are
from the treasure of His wisdom. In the causes, nature, and affections
of the eclipses of the sun and moon, there is most excellent speculation;
but to profound farther, and to contemplate a reason why His providence
hath so disposed and ordered their motions in that vast circle, as to
conjoin and obscure each other, is a sweeter piece of reason, and a
diviner point of philosophy; therefore sometimes, and in some things,
there appears to me as much divinity in Galen's books _De Usu Partium_,
as in Suarez's Metaphysics: had Aristotle been as curious in the inquiry
of this cause as he was of the other, he had not left behind him an
imperfect piece of philosophy, but an absolute tract of divinity.



ON DEATH