Page:Thoughts on art and life.djvu/216

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water to obtain life and perpetual motion, and to the supreme fool,— the necromancer and the magician.

100.

There is no part of astronomy which does not depend on the visual lines and on perspective, the daughter of painting; because the painter is he who by the necessity of his art has begotten perspective, and it is impossible to do without lines which include all the various figures of the bodies begotten by nature and without which the art of geometry is blind. And while the geometrist reduces every surface surrounded by lines to a square, and each body to the figure of the cube, and mathematics do the same with their cube roots and square roots, these two sciences deal only with the continuous and discontinuous quantity, but they do not deal with the quality which constitutes the beauty of the works of nature and the ornament of the world.

101.

Here the adversary will say that he does not want so much knowledge, and the mere skill of depicting nature will suffice him. To which I make reply that there is no greater error than to trust to our judgement without other reasoning, as experience, the enemy of alchemists, necromancers and other foolish intellects, has in all times proved.

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