There is no Attribute that adds more difficulty to the mystery of the
Trinity, where, though in a relative way of Father and Son, we must deny
a priority. I wonder how Aristotle could conceive the World eternal,
or how he could make good two Eternities: his similitude of a Triangle,
comprehended in a square, doth somewhat illustrate the Trinity of our
Souls, and that the Triple Unity of God; for there is in us not three,
but a Trinity of Souls, because there is in us, if not three distinct
Souls, yet differing faculties, that can and do subsist apart in
different Subjects, and yet in us are thus united as to make but one
Soul and substance: if one Soul were so perfect as to inform three
distinct Bodies, that were a pretty Trinity: conceive, the distinct
number of three, not divided nor separated by the Intellect, but
actually comprehended in its Unity, and that is a perfect Trinity. I
have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret
Magick of numbers. Beware of Philosophy, is a precept not to be received
in too large a sense; for in this Mass of Nature there is a set of
things that carry in their Front, though not in Capital Letters, yet in
Stenography and short Characters, something of Divinity, which to wiser
Reasons serve as Luminaries in the Abyss of Knowledge, and to judicious
beliefs as Scales and Roundles to mount the Pinacles and highest pieces
of Divinity. The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the
Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible World is but a Picture of the
invisible, wherein as in a Pourtraict, things are not truely, but in
equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more real substance in
that invisible Fabrick
