Telesius me Delectavit

Abstract

Having become worried because it seemed to me that one could not find truth in the Peripatetic school and because falsehood had taken the place of truth, I took up the task of examining all the commentators on Aristotle - Greek, Latin, and Arabic - and my doubts with respect to their doctrines were increased. I wanted therefore to discover also whether their assertions could be verified in the world, which - as I learned from the doctrines of the philosophers - is the living book of God. And since my teachers were not able to respond to the objections that I raised to whatever they taught, I decided to read for myself all the books of Plato, Pliny, Galen, the books of the Stoics, those of the followers of Democritus, but above all the works of Telesio, so that I might compare them with the book of nature and thereby find out, from such a comparison with the original and autograph version, how much truth and how much falsehood there was in the copies. In the course of public disputes at Cosenza or in private conversations with fellow friars, the replies of my interlocutors did not succeed in allaying my doubts. Only Telesio replenished my spirit with joy, both on account of his liberty of philosophizing and also because he derived his opinions from the natural world, and not from the words of men.