“Marvelous is the love and fellowship of the flesh and the soul, of the spirit of life and the mud of the earth: for the whole man may be said to be formed from these two conjoined.
For thus it is written: “God made man from the mud of the earth, and breathed the breath of life into his face ”[Genesis 2:7], giving him sense and intellect, so that through sense he might vivify the clay associated with him, and through intellect rule it; that likewise he might enter inwardly through the intellect and contemplate the wisdom of God, and outwardly through the sense behold the works of his wisdom.
God illuminated the intellect from within but adorned the sense without, so that the whole man might find recreation in both, namely felicity within and enjoyment without.
But since outward things cannot last long, man is bidden to turn from the things without to the things within and to ascend from the things within to the things above, that is to say from sense to imagination, from imagination to reason, from reason to intellect, thence to mind or intelligence and thus to God.”
― Robert Fludd, Essential Readings
