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acted in the universe, but he shared his German rival’s belief in a ranked order. He too began with God, utterly unknowable and omnipotent, beneath whom came the whole catalog of angels, followed by himself and the rest of humankind. Then came everything else. “All regions below,” he wrote, “are replenished with living creatures, not only the earth with beasts and sea with fishes and the air with fowls and insects but also standing waters, vinegar, the bodies and blood of animals and other juices with innumerable living creatures too small to be seen without the help of magnifying glasses” (emphasis added). Creatures too small to be seen except through a magnifying glass! The discovery of a previously unimagined domain teeming with life did not shake his picture of the fundamental organization of nature. The seventeenth-century microscopist Jan Swammerdam rejoiced in what he saw as yet more testimony of divine generosity. In a book he called, without a scrap of subtlety, Bybel der natuure, or the Book of Nature, he affirmed: “I must offer my most humble praise to the great Creator for having made known to us so many specimens of his inexhaustible wisdom, power and goodness.” In this praise, Swammerdam affirmed a truth broadly shared among the learned, that everything God created had its own reason for being. As the philosopher and theologian Henry More wrote, the point of the new passion for discovery—including that of the microcosmos—was to “take contentment and pleasure in observing the glorious Wisdom and Goodness of God, so fairly drawn out and skilfully variegated in the sundry Objects of externall Nature.
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Thomas Levenson (So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease)