III.6 "as an Animal is a Plant"

Thus rather than reading the hieroglyphic Book of Nature and thereby becoming an agent in his own spiritual growth, man becomes himself the book, "stampt and printed" with the "clear and undelible Principles" of divine order. If the arbor inversa trope previously represented a metamorphosis of man's spiritual being, a form of becoming-plant, here it has become a metaphor analogizing two ideas precisely by keeping them separate from one another. Man and plant are no longer interchangeable, but only imperfectly representable between one another -- each one the ground on which the other may sow its seeds.