ABSTRACT
Wilkins finds many of the themes from Antiquity regarding know thyself (KT) present in the European Renaissance. KT as knowing one's measure, and knowing what one is and is not capable of, is employed by secular writers, often exhorting the reader to 'form a true estimate of his capacities and virtues'. The aporia of knowing God through self-knowledge reemerges powerfully in Nicolas Cusanus's idea of learned, or self-educating, ignorance. The emerging shape of KT here will forego yielding destiny to fortune, to the planets, and to astrology, and take responsibility for itself in a natural world whose regularity and harmony will be expressed by science and observation rather than religious dogma. On the transition from self-knowledge to knowledge of God Pascal seeks traces that God may have left on Earth that would lead one to Him, including an innate relativity in the 'landscape' (1966, 48) of man and nature.
