Contextual Lexicon

These twenty-four entries connect exact sentences from the modern reading with literal forms in the historical text. Each separates the passage’s historical argument from a possible reflective application. Follow the passage links to read the qualifications and changes of voice in their setting.

The Desire to Know

“Before little children can speak, they stare at whatever is strange to them.” — unnumbered preliminary.

Source forms: Capacitie, Desire.

The reader’s address makes curiosity evidence of a capacity placed in humanity by its creator. Looking, touching and asking what a thing is precede play in Vaughan’s account. His example does more than recommend study: it supports his theological argument that a natural capacity would not have been given in vain. The ambitious claim that humanity can know everything belongs to that argument.

Reflective possibility: Curiosity can be examined before it becomes a demand for an immediate answer. A reader might ask whether a new encounter is being attended to, named too quickly, or treated only as entertainment. This application does not turn Vaughan’s observations into a modern developmental theory.

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Shame and the Defence of Error

“Indeed, the feeling of disgrace prevails so far with some that they would rather persist in error and defend it against truth than acknowledge their weaknesses.” — unnumbered preliminary.

Source forms: Disgrace, Error.

Vaughan turns the philosopher’s blush into a problem for inquiry. A desire naturally directed towards knowledge can become the defence of one’s standing. His immediate target is the Peripatetic opponent who will not hear another account. The passage also supplies a standard by which readers can examine Vaughan’s own confident assertions and abusive polemic.

Reflective possibility: Correction may threaten an identity built around being knowledgeable. Separating the wish to understand from the wish to win makes room for a different response to a mistake. The sentence invites this examination without guaranteeing that a confident critic is therefore right.

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The Fruits of Knowledge

“Look around you, then, and consider how you are surrounded by infinite treasures and miracles; yet you are so blind that you do not see them.” — unnumbered preliminary.

Source forms: Works, words.

The surrounding argument opposes knowledge whose fruit is action to knowledge reduced to academic conversation. Vaughan has first described material prosperity as dependent upon first matter and its distribution. Treasures therefore retain an economic and natural meaning as well as an imaginative force. The sentence cannot responsibly be detached from his strong claims about what the art can accomplish.

Reflective possibility: A possible reflective use is to ask what an account changes in observation or conduct. Recognising unnoticed resources can be valuable, but an attractive idea about hidden riches is not itself evidence that the promised result exists.

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Truth and Its Reception

“As for the rest, since I cannot force their approval, I shall not beg for it.” — unnumbered preliminary.

Source forms: Approbation, worth.

The reader’s address ends by entrusting the book to its own worth and to a soul capable of understanding it. This independence follows a lengthy attack on an opponent and an allegory in which Truth occupies the rear of Lady Lie’s procession. It is an author’s claim about reception, not proof that neglected writing must be true.

Reflective possibility: One can distinguish dependence on applause from openness to correction. An inquiry need not succeed socially in order to deserve attention; equally, rejection does not establish its merit. The earlier discussion of shame makes that second qualification especially useful.

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Wisdom Planted in the Creature

“Magic is simply the Creator’s wisdom revealed and planted in the creature.” — source p. 1.

Source forms: Wisdom, Creature.

The opening definition governs Vaughan’s defence of the word magic. He places it within creation and religion, then invokes the Magi who attended Christ. Later he distinguishes this art from conjuring and from the literal imitation of symbols. His definition is a contested seventeenth-century claim; the edition retains it without making it a definition of every historical practice called magic.

Reflective possibility: The image of wisdom planted in a creature can direct attention towards capacities received rather than invented. A symbolic reading can explore that relation while keeping visible Vaughan’s insistence that the same wisdom concerns the physical world.

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The Seal of the Fathers

“Give him the authority of his fathers and he immediately submits to its seal.” — source p. 2.

Source forms: Authoritie, Seale.

Vaughan presents a sharply generalised picture of Jewish acceptance of ancestral authority, followed by early Christian initiation through belief. These are rhetorical examples in his defence of a disputed science. Their presence should not be mistaken for a neutral account of all Jewish or Christian habits of interpretation. The following pages complicate authority by asking how knowledge can actually be received.

Reflective possibility: An inherited name may make a proposition familiar before its grounds have been examined. Reflection can ask what authority contributes—testimony, trust, institutional standing—and what remains to be understood. That question applies to the authors Vaughan endorses as well as those he attacks.

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Assent Through Love

‘For I receive my principles and, having received them, believe them [New translation of the Latin:] “solely through love for the one who reveals them”; [Vaughan’s own English rendering:] only out of my affection for him who reveals them.’ — source p. 4.

Source forms: Love, Revelantem.

This sentence completes a thought begun on the previous page: the art’s principles depend upon God’s spirit, and their reception ends in love. The Latin emphasises the revealer; Vaughan’s following English gloss is retained separately. Love here describes a relation of trust and devotion within his account of revelation, rather than a replacement for every form of reasoning.

Reflective possibility: The passage permits a question about how attachment shapes assent. Affection can sustain patient attention; it can also make a reader reluctant to test a beloved teacher’s claims. Reading this sentence beside the warning about defending error keeps both possibilities available.

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The Symbol and the Invented Charm

“Interpreting these according to his own fancy, the ordinary reader invented charms and formulas by which he promised wonders.” — source p. 7.

Source forms: Verbum, Sermo.

The preceding maxim says that an utterance works only when formed or animated by God’s word. Vaughan then describes readers who substitute verbal formulas for the relation the words indicate. Circles and triangles likewise become conjuring figures when their intended reference to nature’s rotation is lost. The criticism concerns a failure of interpretation within his own defence of magic.

Reflective possibility: A symbol can be repeated accurately while its function is misunderstood. A reflective reader may ask what relation a sign is supposed to express before treating possession of the sign as possession of its power. This does not require deciding that all the book’s physical language is secretly psychological.

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The Withholding of Blessing

“Evil, properly speaking, is a corruption that immediately takes place upon the removal of good.” — source p. 14.

Source forms: Corruption, Removall.

The curse is explained through withdrawal: divine light is removed, and matter becomes darker, colder and less fruitful. Vaughan distinguishes this diminished condition from the final extremes of heaven and hell. The account connects moral transgression with an altered natural world and prepares the later claim that restoration concerns creatures as well as humanity.

Reflective possibility: The image can suggest that damage sometimes follows the loss of a sustaining condition. Used reflectively, this directs attention to what has ceased to nourish a situation. It should not be used to explain a person’s suffering as proof of moral fault.

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The Liberty of Creation

“As they were cursed for man’s sake in his Fall, so it seems they will also be blessed for his sake in his restoration.” — source p. 16.

Source forms: Creature, Liberty.

Vaughan reads Romans 8 as distinguishing nonhuman creatures from God’s children while allowing both the same promised liberty. His argument extends the effects of fall and restoration beyond the individual soul. Notice his qualification, “it seems”: the inference follows his reading of the passage rather than appearing as an independently established natural fact.

Reflective possibility: A reflective application can consider how human action affects a wider world of lives and conditions. The sentence offers a language of shared consequence, while its historical framework remains a Christian interpretation of creation and redemption.

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The Stranger in the World

“I therefore conclude that he had an instructor to initiate him into the ways of life and show him that wilderness’s intricate, narrow paths.” — source p. 18.

Source forms: Instructor, Necessities.