How this Art is useful to you

This Art is useful in the highest degree and has many valuable features. 

First, it is useful on account of its general and transcendental character because its principles belong to the highest order of generality and are true, necessary and primordial (as has been shown) and the principles of other sciences can be tested with them. 

Thus, the Art is a way to gain access to any faculty of study, and not only in speculative areas such as theoretical physics, mathematics, metaphysics and theology, but also in the fields of psychology, the moral sciences, linguistics, mechanics as well as medicine, canon law and civil law. 

And there is nothing out of bounds for this Art in which all things are seen to emanate from one source; it is most useful as a very bright light that the intellect can use to destroy its enemy, namely ignorance. 

It is most useful to you as a learning tool because it comprehends many things in a small number of loci without any instability and while you discourse with it, all things fall into place in its loci where they can be readily retrieved by your memory. 

And it is extremely useful  because it is lofty and profound when it discourses in the most lofty and profound way about God and all the articles of faith while proving them to be true. 

It is useful in the highest degree because it can reach into all the subtlest intellectual concepts. 

And finally, it is most useful because by applying it you can learn more in one year than anyone could ordinarily expect to learn in twelve years, as many have experienced, and it is worth infinitely more than gold as it provides broad and ample access to acquiring perfect science in a short time to those who put it to use, as you can see when you consider its layout and discourse.

Fr. Bernard de Lavinheta, O.F.M., in his Practical Compendium of the Art of Blessed Raymond Lull. First published in Latin, in France, in 1523 and reprinted by Minerva in Germany in 1977, in a critical edition by Fr. Wolfram Platzek O.F.M. This English translation from the Latin by Yanis Dambergs, May 1999.

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