SECT.  XXX.  Of Man.

Let us not stop any longer with animals inferior to man.  It is high time to consider and study the nature of man himself, in order to discover Him whose image he is said to bear.  I know but two sorts of beings in all nature: those that are endowed with knowledge or reason, and those that are not Now man is a compound of these two modes of being.  He has a body, as the most inanimate corporeal beings have; and he has a spirit, a mind, or a soul—that is, a thought whereby he knows himself, and perceives what is about him.  If it be true that there is a First Being who has drawn or created all the rest from nothing, man is truly His image; for he has, like Him, in his nature all the real perfection that is to be found in those two various kinds or modes of being.  But an image is but an image still, and can be but an adumbration or shadow of the true Perfect Being.

Let us begin to study man by the contemplation of his body.  “I know not,” said a mother to her children in the Holy Writ, “how you were formed in my womb.”  Nor is it, indeed, the wisdom of the parents that forms so compounded and so regular a work.  They have no share in that wonderful art; let us therefore leave them, and trace it up higher.