evident that Jacob Böhme had no bad taste in mineralogy; that he had delight in flowers also, and consequently a faculty for botany, is proved by the following passages among others:--"The heavenly powers gave birth to heavenly joy-giving fruits and colours, to all sorts of trees and shrubs, whereupon grows the beauteous and lovely fruit of life: also there spring up in these powers all sorts of flowers with beauteous heavenly colours and scents. Their taste is various, in each according to its quality and kind, altogether holy, divine, and joy-giving." "If thou desirest to contemplate the heavenly, divine pomp and glory, as they are, and to know what sort of products, pleasure, or joys there are above: look diligently at this world, at the varieties of fruits and plants that grow upon the earth,--trees, shrubs, vegetables, roots, flowers, oils, wines, corn, and everything that is there, and that thy heart can search out. All this is an image of the heavenly pomp." [65] A despotic fiat could not suffice as an explanation of the origin of Nature to Jacob Böhme; Nature appealed too strongly to his senses, and lay too near his heart; hence he sought for a natural explanation of Nature; but he necessarily found no other ground of explanation than those qualities of Nature which made the strongest impression on him. Jacob Böhme--this is his essential character--is a mystical natural philosopher, a theosophic Vulcanist and Neptunist, [66] for according to him "all things had their origin in fire and water." Nature had fascinated Jacob's religious sentiments,--not in vain did he receive his mystical light from the shining of tin utensils; but the religious sentiment works only within itself; it has not the force, not the courage, to press forward to the examination of things in their reality; it looks at all things through the medium of religion, it sees all in God, i.e., in the entrancing, soul-possessing splendour of the imagination, it sees all in images and as an image. But Nature affected his mind in an opposite manner; hence he must place this opposition in God himself,--for the supposition of two independently existing, opposite, original principles would have afflicted his religious sentiment;--he must distinguish in God himself a gentle, beneficent element, and a fierce consuming one. Everything fiery, bitter, harsh, contracting, dark, cold, comes from a divine harshness and bitterness; everything mild, lustrous, warming, tender, soft, yielding, from a mild, soft, luminous quality in God. "Thus are the creatures on the earth, in the water, and in the air, each creature out of its own science, out of good and evil.... As one sees before one's eyes that there are good and evil creatures; as venomous beasts and serpents from the centre of the nature of darkness, from the power of the fierce quality, which only want to dwell in darkness, abiding in caves and hiding themselves from the sun. By each animal's food and dwelling we see