Borges' epigraph: full text

By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters...
The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV

Nay, what shall the Scripture itself? Which is like an apothecary's shop,
wherein are all remedies for all infirmities of mind, purgatives, cordials,
alteratives, corroboratives, lenitives, &c. "Every disease of the soul,"
saith [3356]Austin, "hath a peculiar medicine in the Scripture; this only
is required, that the sick man take the potion which God hath already
tempered." [3357]Gregory calls it "a glass wherein we may see all our
infirmities," _ignitum colloquium_, Psalm cxix. 140. [3358]Origen a charm.
And therefore Hierom prescribes Rusticus the monk, [3359]"continually to
read the Scripture, and to meditate on that which he hath read; for as
mastication is to meat, so is meditation on that which we read." I would
for these causes wish him that, is melancholy to use both human and divine
authors, voluntarily to impose some task upon himself, to divert his
melancholy thoughts: to study the art of memory, Cosmus Rosselius, Pet.
Ravennas, Scenkelius' Detectus, or practise brachygraphy, &c., that will
ask a great deal of attention: or let him demonstrate a proposition in
Euclid, in his five last books, extract a square root, or study Algebra:
than which, as [3360]Clavius holds, "in all human disciplines nothing can
be more excellent and pleasant, so abstruse and recondite, so bewitching,
so miraculous, so ravishing, so easy withal and full of delight," _omnem
humanum captum superare videtur_. By this means you may define _ex ungue
leonem_, as the diverb is, by his thumb alone the bigness of Hercules, or
the true dimensions of the great [3361]Colossus, Solomon's temple, and
Domitian's amphitheatre out of a little part. By this art you may
contemplate the variation of the twenty-three letters, which may be so
infinitely varied, that the words complicated and deduced thence will not
be contained within the compass of the firmament; ten words may be varied
40,320 several ways: by this art you may examine how many men may stand one
by another in the whole superficies of the earth, some say
148,456,800,000,000, _assignando singulis passum quadratum_ (assigning a
square foot to each), how many men, supposing all the world as habitable as
France, as fruitful and so long-lived, may be born in 60,000 years, and so
may you demonstrate with [3362]Archimedes how many sands the mass of the
whole world might contain if all sandy, if you did but first know how much
a small cube as big as a mustard-seed might hold, with infinite such. But
in all nature what is there so stupendous as to examine and calculate the
motion of the planets, their magnitudes, apogees, perigees, eccentricities,
how far distant from the earth, the bigness, thickness, compass of the
firmament, each star, with their diameters and circumference, apparent
area, superficies, by those curious helps of glasses, astrolabes, sextants,
quadrants, of which Tycho Brahe in his mechanics, optics ([3363]divine
optics) arithmetic, geometry, and such like arts and instruments?