fire of anger instead of forcing his way through to the fire of love.  Thus that which was one in God is divided.  Lucifer becomes enamored of the tart quality (the centrum naturae or the matrix) and will not grow into the heart of God; and it is only after such lingering behind that the kingdom of wrath become a real hell.  Heaven and hell are not future conditions, but are experienced here on earth; he who instead of subduing animality becomes enamored of it, stands under the wrath of God; whereas he who abjures self dwells in the joyous kingdom of mercy.  He alone truly believes who himself becomes Christ, who repeats in himself what Christ suffered and attained.

The creation of the material world is a result of Lucifer’s fall.  Boehme’s description of it, based on the Mosaic account of creation, may be passed without notice; similarly his view of cognition, familiar from the earlier mystics, that all knowledge is derived from self-knowledge, that our destination is to comprehend God from ourselves, and the world from God.  Man, whose body, spirit, and soul hold in them the earthly, the sidereal, and the heavenly, is at once a microcosm and a “little God.”

Under the intractable form of Boehme’s speculations and amid their riotous fancy, no one will fail to recognize their true-hearted sensibility and an unusual depth and vigor of thought.  They found acceptance in England and France, and have been revived in later times in the systems of Baader and Schelling.

%7.  The Foundation of Modern Physics%.

In no field has the modern period so completely broken with tradition as in physics.  The correctness of the Copernican theory is proved by Kepler’s laws of planetary movement, and Galileo’s telescopical observations; the scientific theory of motion is created by Galileo’s laws of projectiles, falling bodies, and the pendulum; astronomy and mechanics form the entrance to exact physics—­Descartes ventures an attempt at a comprehensive mechanical explanation of nature.  And thus an entirely new movement is at hand.  Forerunners, it is true, had not been lacking.  Roger Bacon (1214-94) had already sought to obtain an empirical knowledge of nature based upon mathematics; and the great painter Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) had discovered the principles of mechanics, though without gaining much influence over the work of his contemporaries.  It was reserved for the triple star which has been mentioned to overthrow Scholasticism.  The conceptions with which the Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy of nature sought to get at phenomena—­substantial forms, properties, qualitative change—­are thrown aside; their place is taken by matter, forces working under law, rearrangement of parts.  The inquiry into final causes is rejected as an anthropomorphosis of natural events, and deduction from efficient causes is alone accepted as scientific explanation.  Size, shape, number, motion, and law are the only and the