Page:Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia) (1651).djvu/548

 But Horace calls them furies or madness, where he sings,

"Girles have a thousand furies, so have boyes."

The same also seems to he of opinion that all men are fools in something. Whence is read in Ecclesiasticus, there are an infinite number of fools. Therefore the Stoicks deny that passions are incident to a wise man; I say such passions, which follow the sensitive apprehension: for rational, and mental passions, they yeld a wise man may have. This opinion did Boetius seem to be of, where he sings that some passions are to be laid aside in the inquisition of truth, in these verses,

"If truth thou wouldst discover with clear sight, And walk in the right path, then from thee quit Joy, fear, grief, hope expel; for where these raign, The mind is dark, and bound -"

We must therefore acquit and avert our minds from all multitudes, and such like passions, that we may attain to the simple truth; which indeed many Philosophers are said to have attained to in the solitude of a long time. For the mind by solitude being loosed from all care of humane affairs is at leisure, and prepared to receive the gifts of the celestial dieties. So Moses the law-giver to the Hebrews, and the greatest of prophets, and learned in all the knowledge of the Chaldeans and Aegyptians, when he would abstract himself from senses, went into the vast wildernesses of Ethiopia, where all humane affairs being laid aside, he applied his mind to the sole contemplation of divine things, in which thing he so pleased the omnipotent God, that he suffered him to see him face to face, and also gave him a wondrous power of miracles, as sacred writ testifies of him. So Zoroastes the father and prince of the Magicians, is said to attain to the knowledge of all naturall and divine things by the solitude of twenty years, when he wrot, and did very strange things concerning all the art of divining, and soothsaying. The like things do the writings of Orpheus to Museus