Note 81 — THE COMMON KNOWLEDGE OF SHAKESPEARE AND BACON

“It is the fashion to talk as if art were something different from nature, or a sort of addition to nature, with power to finish what nature has begun, or correct her when going aside. In truth, man has no power over nature except that of motion—the power, I say, of putting natural bodies together, or separating them—the rest is done by nature within.” Descriptio Globi Intellectualis, circ. 1612. Man (e.g.) as the modern writer puts it, “can bring together the radium and the bouillon, but the radiobe, whatever it may be, is none the less a product of nature.” “The art itself is nature.”