'One must study the elements, follow Nature from land to land, since each single country is only one leaf in the book of creation. The eyes that find pleasure in this true experience are the true professors, and more reliable than all learned writings.' He held man to be less God's very image than a microcosmic copy of Nature--the quintessence of the whole world. Other enthusiasts made similar statements. Sebastian Frank of Donauwörth (1543) looked upon the whole world as an open book and living Bible, in which to study the power and art of God and learn His will: everything was His image, all creatures are 'a reflection, imprint, and expression of God, through knowledge of which man may come to know the true Mover and Cause of all things.' He shewed warm feeling for Nature in many similes and descriptions[4]-- in fact, much of his pithy drastic writing sounds pantheistic. But he was very far from the standpoint of the great Italian philosophers, Giordano Bruno and Campanella. Bruno, a poet as well as thinker, distinguished Nature in her self-development--matter, soul, and mind--as being stages and phases of the One. The material of all things issues from the original womb, For Nature works with a master hand in her own inner depths; She is art, alive and gifted with a splendid mind. Which fashions its own material, not that of others, And does not falter or doubt, but all by itself Lightly and surely, as fire burns and sparkles. Easily and widely, as light spreads everywhere, Never scattering its forces, but stable, quiet, and at one, Orders and disposes of everything together. Campanella, even in a revolting prison, sang in praise of the wisdom and love of God, and His image in Nature. He personified everything in her; nothing was without feeling; the very movements of the stars depended on sympathy and antipathy; harmony was the central soul of all things. The most extraordinary of all German thinkers was the King of Mystics, Jacob Böhme. Theist and pantheist at once, his mind was a ferment of different systems of thought. It is very difficult to unriddle his _Aurora_, but love of Nature, as well as love of God, is clear in its mystical utterances: God is the heart or source of Nature. Nature is the body of God. 'As man's mind rules his whole body in every vein and fills his whole being, so the Holy Ghost fills all Nature, and is its heart and rules in the good qualities of all things.' 'But now heaven is a delightful chamber of pleasure, in which are all the powers, as in all Nature the sky is the heart of the waters.' In another place he calls God the vital power in the tree of life, the creatures His branches, and Nature the perfection and self-begotten of God. Nature's powers are explained as passion, will, and love, often in lofty and beautiful comparisons: