God has given us two books—­the book of all living beings, or Nature, and the Holy Scriptures.  The first was given to man from the beginning when all things were created, for each living being is but a letter of the alphabet written by the finger of God, and the book is composed of them all together as a book is of letters ... man is the capital letter of this book.  This book is not like the other, falsified and spoilt, but familiar and intelligible; it makes man joyous and humble and obedient, a hater of evil and a lover of virtue.

Among the savants of the Renaissance who applied the inductive method to Nature before Bacon,[14] we must include the thoughtful and pious Spaniard Luis Vives (1540), who wrote concerning the useless speculations of alchemists and astrologers about occult things:  ’It is not arguing that is needed here, but silent observation of Nature.’  Knowledge of Nature, he said, would serve both body and soul.

The tender religious lyrics of the mystic, Luis de Leon, followed next.[15] His life (1521-1591) brings us up to the days of the Inquisition.  He himself, an excellent teacher and man of science, was imprisoned for years for opinions too openly expressed in his writings; but with all his varied fortunes he never lost his innate manliness and tenderness.  His biographer tells us, that as soon as the holidays began, he would hurry away from the gloomy lecture rooms and the noisy students at Salamanca, to the country, where he had taken an estate belonging to a monastery at the foot of a hill by a river, with a little island close by.

It had a large uncultivated garden, made beautiful by fine old trees, with paths among the vines and a stream running through it to the river, and a long avenue of poplars whose rustle blended with the noise of the mill-wheel.  Beyond was a view of fields.  Leon would sit for hours here undisturbed, dipping his feet in the brook under a poplar—­the tree which was reputed to flourish on sand alone and give shelter to all the birds under heaven—­while the rustle of the leaves sang his melancholy to sleep.  His biographer goes on to say that he had the Spaniard’s special delight in Nature, and understood her language and her secrets; and the veiled splendour of her tones, colours, and forms could move him to tears.  As he sat there gazing at the clouds, he felt lifted up in heart by the insignificance of all things in comparison with the spirit of man.

In the pitching and tossing of his ‘ships of thought’ he never lost the consciousness of Nature’s beauty, and would pray the clouds to carry his sighs with them in their tranquil course through heaven.  He loved the sunrise, birds, flowers, bees, fishes; nothing was meaningless to him; all things were letters in a divine alphabet, which might bring him a message from above.  Nature was symbolic; the glow of dawn meant the glow of divine love; a wide view, true freedom; rays of sunshine, rays of divine glory; the setting sun, eternal light; stars, flowers of light in an everlasting spring.