That preparing a universal medicine requires no particular thing—animal, vegetable, or mineral—but a universal and catholic subject.

We must first assume that, just as the whole world is, as everyone knows, distinguished into the higher and the lower, so the lower world—which humankind inhabits and which I now intend to discuss—is itself divided into three subordinate realms: animals, plants, and minerals.

Although, as argued above, everything arose from water and the elements and can be resolved into water and the elements, and although we may likewise reduce things in thought and theory—for example, a human being to seed, seed to blood, blood to chyle, and chyle to bread; then bread to flour, flour to grain, grain to earth, and earth to water; and similarly the metals to their Mercury, Sulfur, and Salt, and these again to the elements—nevertheless no reduction or resolution of particular things into prime matter and the universal principles can actually be accomplished in practice.

Therefore, speaking now only of plants and minerals, since animals do not serve our purpose, chymistry can obtain from them only vegetable water, oil, and salt, or a Mercury, Sulfur, and Salt of Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and so forth. It cannot reduce them to their first matter, the elements, and the universal principles. The ancient philosophical axiom remains forever true: “There is no return in nature.” Thus no universal medicine can be prepared from an animal, plant, or mineral, or even from all of them together; it requires, once and for all, a universal and catholic subject. For “as the cause is, so is the effect.” As Ristius also says: “Every beginning must bear witness to its end, and every end to its beginning.”

In particular, the author of the treatise published against Glauber under the title Sudum Philosophicum writes rightly and well: “The philosophical universal is not so called because everything in the world must contribute to it, but because the powers of the whole of nature are found gathered together in our matter.”

Yet an objection might be raised, both generally and about rainwater in particular. Although rainwater is neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, it is nevertheless a particular thing, rather than universal and catholic: the waters were indeed created at first by God’s eternal universal Word, but as a single mass; now they have been separated into different parts, and so are no longer universal. Some also raise the objection that, since we cannot partake of or obtain the first matter created by God, from which everything else was created, no universal medicine can be produced. To meet these objections, which are in any case without weight, we must know the following: