The practitioner pursues another generation: regeneration into a permanent, immortal, glorified, penetrating quintessence, spiritual body and corporeal spirit. Because human beings are continually afflicted and short-lived, the intention is to separate creatures from corrupting moisture or recolaceum and bring them into a stony, salty, readily soluble medicine that dissolves pleasantly in every moisture. Taken into the body, it should penetrate as smoke penetrates all air: from the stomach through the whole body to the extremity of the remotest bone or marrow. Then complete healing of diseases will follow, and animal, vital, and natural spirits and every member will be strengthened, making nature itself powerful enough to expel its enemy through this fortification. Sick nature, or the diseased Archeus, needs only strong assistance. Disease has overcome and mastered it; it must remain subjected until powerful help arrives to resist the enemy. Then the Archeus, together with all remaining natural powers and the added assistance, confronts disease. They contend until disease is overcome; the Archeus, victorious, begins its dominion anew and rules until it restores the former condition.

A learned physician knows that nature needs only strengthening to become powerful enough to help itself. Such strengthening can best be obtained through regeneration into quintessence, where everything is pure and clean, a fixed and spiritual medicine. Further, my failure to teach separation of dregs will make many learned people thunder, so entrenched has separation of dregs become that everyone wants only to separate them, without examining whether they contained the kernel while he retained the husks. This will startle the learned, much more a beginner without deep learning. I acknowledge that I separate no dregs and will recognize no such dregs throughout nature. Though all philosophers have separated dregs for two or three thousand years, I now say nature has none. Everything it made is pure, good, and sound, must remain together, and cannot be dispensed with. To state first what I mean by dregs: they arise when something contrary is added to a subject from outside. If I set a stone, mineral, or corrosive poison before a person as food, everyone sees that nature did not make it as food for that person. It is contrary and heterogeneous to him: for him it is a dreg.

Nature did not allot mineral subjects or poison as human food, but plants such as bread and wine and animals such as beef and veal. These are homogeneous and agreeable to people. Everything therefore receives its like and casts off what is contrary as excrement, dregs, or something heterogeneous. Yet such excrement is not absolutely and wholly a dreg or a condemned thing or earth, useful for nothing. If unsuitable for this, nature assigned it to something else. Things not immediately belonging together, such as minerals and animals, are mutually dregs, contrary and heterogeneous. Yet though immediately contrary and heterogeneous in species and individuality, considered universally or in essence they are inwardly homogeneous, since all sprang from one first matter. Their definite middles, such as the vegetable kingdom, can readily make them homogeneous. To prove theoretically and practically that no dregs exist in nature and that everything an individual or universal possesses is supremely necessary to it, I say first: all things sprang from the purest God, made by, through, from, and in him as the most single One. If God is pure, all creatures proceeding from him must necessarily be pure and clean.

God awakened from himself his holy word Fiat, which became a very pure, clear vapour. This vapour resolved into a pure crystalline water in which no impurity could be perceived: only pure and good creatures that God made from this pure, clear water. Had they been impure, he would not himself have said, “And it was good.” If creation was good before Eve’s fall, everyone must admit, as practice clearly shows too, that no condemned earth or dregs were present. Yet creatures from first matter were the same before the Fall as now after it. Where could dregs have come from afterward? They were not in the world, for everything from God was good; nor can they come from pure God. Some say God cursed the world for Adam’s sin after his fall and this curse brought dregs into the world. They misunderstand. Curse opposes blessing, goodness, and flourishing. The more God blesses, the more the world flourishes; when he curses, blessing and power diminish to punish human sin. This does not mean creation becomes impure or that he throws dregs into nature.

For example, an herb, animal, or mineral possessed a thousandfold power before the Fall. God took its power and virtue away except for a few, enclosing and hiding what was taken in the treasury of the great mystery, lest through this knowledge of good and evil and its evil application a person again make himself a god, knowing how to apply it for good and still more for evil, as Adam foolishly let himself be led astray in transgressing concerning the tree of good and evil. Yet know this: God deprived nature of no power at all. Rather, he deprived the human being—made lord and ruler in the world and given before the Fall knowledge of every good thing at first sight—of understanding of these natural and supernatural matters. I say he entirely removed and displaced that understanding, so that by nature a person knows no more than an irrational creature. He must learn through long experience, good or bad education, and subordinate instructors; by nature and birth he knows nothing. Dregs were not mixed into animal, herb, or mineral. Rather, after his first innocence of angelic nature, the human being can no longer recognize them or see into creatures’ centre as before. Understanding and senses were made deaf through the predestination of the first fall. He cannot apply creatures with certainty, making only conjectures and no certainty throughout, unless the Creator privileges him through special grace.

From this darkness of understanding a person concludes that dregs were thrown into nature. Suppose I grant that a practitioner separates every imagined dreg from a thing: does he think he has immediately fathomed all its powers and virtues? By no means. Ask yourself what you wish to use a pure creature for and how to apply it. You answer: “I have reflected, read, or heard that it is good for this or that and should be applied so.” Yet this does not give you knowledge of its true power from yourself: others communicated it, or you would not have known. It is merely your conjecture and theirs, or long experience. You have scarcely experienced even one power at its ground. Tell me the next. You do not know it. Why? The curse darkens your understanding. For Adam’s sin it attached dregs or ignorance only to human understanding, not to any other creature. Understanding and wisdom to recognize things and apply them for your good were taken from you. Without hearing or reading it from your forebears, you would know less than nothing about it, like every irrational beast. That is the curse; those are the dregs we can never separate without God’s own will.

This is why God said to Adam: “You are born entirely without understanding or reason. Learn through hard labour, sweat, and toil; seek through long experience, test everything, judge and distinguish what you find good and evil. Through long work you will recognize whether it suits you. Apply what is useful and suitable for your good and that of all your brothers of Adam. Note evil too, but not to harm your neighbour: rather so that others, knowing it, may avoid it.” Before Adam fell, if God had willed, you could have recognized everything and its full power at first sight without effort, using it without conjecture or wandering through infused wisdom. Now you must experiment and seek through sweat and sorrow, hard toil and perspiration. This is the dreg that drove a stake into the eyes of understanding of all Adam’s children. This is what Adam forfeited through the bite of the apple: freedom and golden liberty, the privilege of human nature.

I have shown theoretically that I can find no dregs in nature; now I shall demonstrate it practically, for example through plants. Gently distil a previously putrefied plant in a still, drawing spirit and recolaceous phlegm off until a still fairly moist liquor or mass remains. Drive that residue through a retort, distilling by degrees everything that will pass: its coarser phlegm, acid, and thick oil. In the retort you find a charcoal-like dead head. Practitioners burn this to ashes, leach the ashes, and throw the remainder away as dregs. As in the vegetable kingdom, so in the animal. In the mineral kingdom, after distillation they extract salt from the dead head and throw the rest away as dregs. O chymists, what are you doing? You burn hops and malt alike. You burn the charcoal containing the best embryonic sulphur, the more fixed vegetable sulphur, the best and most fixed tincture of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and likewise minerals. These are not dregs but a very powerful medicine for removing fixed diseases—and you throw it away! This is the cause and principal point of all your error, why you cannot cure the more fixed diseases. You yourselves say fixed diseases must be cured with fixed medicine, yet throw away the best tincture, the fire-resistant sulphur.

You will answer: “What use are charcoal and the dead head? There is no solvent that attacks and dissolves charcoal. What can one make from it?” If you know no way to turn it to benefit, I shall show one, following nature itself. After distilling all parts of an animal, plant, or mineral, you obtain, following the volatile and its accompanying phlegm through the still, a sharp sour liquor from the residue through a retort, like distilled vinegar. Here I call that vegetable vinegar or acid; in animals, animal vinegar; in minerals, mineral acid. In distilling animal or plant, a thick foul-smelling oil follows this vinegar, with charcoal remaining as the dead head. Minerals, however, being strongly fermented and coagulated bodies, do not possess so extremely volatile a spirit as the other two kingdoms. They have a subtler phlegm, followed by a strong corrosive acid spirit, then a still more corrosive liquor chymists call corrosive oil; the dead head remains.