40 Questions Of The Soul by Jacob Böehme

Amsterdam: Sebrut Im Jabre Chrifti ,1682. Text in German. 287 pages. 6 X 4.5 inches. Complete with all plates. An excellent example of a rare title. 

Jacob Böehme (1575-1624), German visionary and founder of the Behmenist sects, was a shoemaker and amateur chemist who claimed to have received visions from the Holy Spirit on at least three striking occasions. His works were popular in England, and it has been noted that much of Quaker doctrine borrows from Boehme's ideas.
His interest in astrology and cosmology often played key parts in writings and he believed divine essence lies within oneself, that people mirror the universe and are a reflection of God.

His ideas had a profound influence on later philosophical movements such as German idealism and Romanticism. Poets such as John Milton, William Blake and W. B. Yeats found inspiration in his writings. Hegel went as far as to say that Böehme was "the first German philosopher".

"This outward world is to the outward man, the best looking-glass to see whatever hath been, is, or shall be in eternity. Our minds, and the cogitations therein, are our best inward looking-glass, to see eternity exactly in: In God are all things, therefore everything hath been in all eternity in God. So that if we consider all the works of God in the world, both inwardly and outwardly, we cannot but find and know him, and so know all things in ourselves and in him, and him in ourselves, and in all things else.. This I thought convenient to hint in brief, as an Introduction of the mind into the centre of all Mysteries."