1. In the garden stands a tree. In springtime it bears flowers; in the autumn, fruit.
2. Its fruit is knowledge, teaching the good gardener how to understand the world.
3. From it he learns how the tree grows from seed to sapling, from sapling to maturity, at last ready to offer more life.
4. And from maturity to age and sleep, whence it returns to the elements of things.
5. The elements in turn feed new births; such is nature's method, and its parallel with the course of humankind.
6. It was from the fall of a fruit from such a tree that new inspiration came for inquiry into the nature of things,
7. When Newton sat in his garden, and saw what no one had seen before: that an apple draws the earth to itself, and the earth the apple,
8. Through a mutual force of nature that holds all things, from the planets to the stars, in unifying embrace.
9. So all things are gathered into one thing: the universe of nature, in which there are many worlds: the orbs of light in an immensity of space and time.
10. And among them their satellites, on one of which is a part of nature that mirrors nature in itself,
11. And can ponder its beauty and significance, and seek to understand it: this is humankind.
12. All other things, in their cycles and rhythms, exist in and of themselves;
13. But in humankind there is experience also, which is what makes good and its opposite.
14. In both of which humankind seeks to grasp the meaning of things.