Johannes Kepler Life and Letters

Book of nature. "We astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature." (44) "To God there are, in the whole material world, … laws, figures and relations … Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind; God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts. For what is there in the human mind besides figures and magnitudes?" (50)Astrology. "How does the face of the sky affect the character of a man at the moment of his birth? It affects the human being as long as he lives in no other way than the knots which the peasant haphazardly puts around the pumpkin. They do not make the pumpkin grow but decide its shape." (51)Kepler's own personality derived from the fact that "with me Saturn and the sun operate together": "To gnaw bones, eat dry bread, taste bitter … things is a delight to me; to walk over rugged paths, uphill, through thickets is a feast and a pleasure to me. I know no other way of seasoning my life than science; I do not long for other spices and reject them if offered to me." (52)Scientific method. "You believe that I start with imagining some pleasant hypothesis and please myself in embellishing it, examining it only later by observations. In this you are very much mistaken. The truth is that after having built up a hypothesis on the ground of observation and given it proper foundations, I feel a particular desire to investigate whether I might discover some natural, pleasant combination between the two. But I never come to a final judgement in advance." (72-73)

Found this book in time to be given as a Christmas gift to a descendant of Mr. Kepler. Was well received to say the least.