|
47. Further, as to the remaining arts, whether those by which
something is made which, when the effort of the workman is over,
remains as a result of his work, as, for example, a house, a bench,
a dish, and other things of that kind; or those which, so to speak,
assist God in His operations, as medicine, and agriculture, and
navigation: or those whose sole result is an action, as dancing, and
racing, and wrestling; in all these arts experience teaches us to
infer the future from the past. For no man who is skilled in any of
these arts moves his limbs in any operation without connecting the
memory of the past with the expectation of the future. Now of these
arts a very superficial and cursory knowledge is to be acquired, not
with a view to practising them (unless some duty compel us, a matter
on which I do not touch at present), but with a view to forming a
judgment about them, that we may not be wholly ignorant of what
Scripture means to convey when it employs figures of speech derived
from these arts.
|
|