Discussion and Study Questions

These 400 questions invite close reading, comparison and historical interpretation. They ask the reader to assess the author’s observations, arguments and language; they do not direct practical experimentation.

The Original Preliminary Matter

Read with: PRE00, Editor’s preface, PRE02, PRE03, Author’s preface.

1. What does the extended title promise to explain about the birth and destruction of natural things?

2. How does its final question connect earthly understanding with heavenly understanding?

3. What does the original editor know about the author, and what does he leave unknown?

4. How does the comparison of three manuscripts affect your understanding of the printed text?

5. What is gained and what is risked by the editor’s decision to preserve imperfect readings?

6. How do the reported prices of manuscripts contribute to the opening presentation of the work?

7. What kinds of evidence support the editor’s claims about the book’s value?

8. Why does the editor withhold the proposed third part?

9. How should that decision affect a modern claim to publish the original work?

10. What changes when the volatile dragon kills the fixed and the fixed kills the volatile?

11. How do the dragons express an operation through their relation to one another?

12. Which line of the double-abyss poem most clearly links ascent with descent?

13. How does the chain diagram preserve distinctions within an account of unity?

14. What role do Adam and Eve perform in the explanation of the chain?

15. How does the soup image translate a cosmological relation into an everyday experience?

16. What does the final promise of overcoming poverty and sickness ask the reader to believe?

17. Why does the author compare his exposition with teaching children their ABC?

18. What distinguishes a disputant from a practitioner in the author’s preface?

19. What relationship between head and hands does the preface propose?

20. Which promise in these preliminaries would you most want to test after reading both books?

Book I Chapter 1 What Nature Is

Read with: I.1.

21. What is included in the mass that the author calls nature?

22. Why does the definition include invisible creatures within a visible world?

23. What boundary does the author draw between God and nature?

24. How does the word mass shape the opening account of the world?

25. Why does the author set aside the distinction between natural and supernatural things here?

26. What work is done by saying that everything was made naturally by God?

27. How are chaos and nothing related in the wording of this definition?

28. What would change if the definition excluded invisible created beings?

29. Which question about activity is left open by this initial definition?

30. How would you explain the definition without adding a modern theory of nature to it?

Book I Chapter 2 the Origin of Things

Read with: I.2.

31. How does the divine word enter the account of material origins?

32. What sequence connects word, vapour and water?

33. How can water be one visible thing while containing an invisible principle?

34. Why does the author insist that spirit needs a body for bodily effects?

35. What functions are assigned to water as instrument and dwelling?

36. What functions are assigned to spirit as worker and smith?

37. Which observations make the movement between vapour and water familiar?

38. How does the example of sweat contribute to a cosmological argument?

39. What does the passage from centre to circumference ask the reader to do?

40. Where does the author move from an observed change to a claim about all things?

Book I Chapter 3 How Generation Occurs

Read with: I.3.

41. What changes as the original water begins to act within itself?

42. How does the appearance of earth alter the initial account of a simple water?

43. What distinctions are introduced by counting one, two, three, four and five?

44. How does the order of separation follow relative subtlety?

45. Why does the author use the familiar degrees of comparison to explain that order?

46. What connects the division of elements with their power to reproduce?

47. How is a particular seed distinguished from the universal seed?

48. Why is a regenerated common seed needed after the primordial division?

49. How do influence and effluence contribute to its production?

50. What does this chapter add to the opening claim that all things share one origin?

Book I Chapter 4 the Generation of Universal Seed

Read with: I.4.

51. How do the four elements become two active and receptive sides?

52. What does the command to grow and multiply require of the divided elements?

53. Why can the most subtle and the most fixed not be joined directly?

54. What work does a medium perform between extremes?

55. How does the author complicate a simple four-step ladder of elements?

56. Why must degrees within an element be considered as well as differences between elements?

57. What is meant by following nature’s order in an operation?

58. How does the example of earth and water illustrate successive extraction?

59. What distinguishes an appeal to a common origin from a sufficient account of conjunction?

60. Which failure would show that the practitioner had selected an unsuitable intermediate stage?

Book I Chapter 5 Regenerated Chaotic Water

Read with: I.5.

61. In what sense does divided chaotic water become common again?

62. How does the chapter relate form to fire and matter to water?

63. What is preserved as one element changes into another?

64. How do increasing density and increasing subtlety reverse one another?

65. What role is assigned to the signs of the elements?

66. How are innate heat and radical moisture connected with the preceding argument?

67. What makes the regenerated seed both celestial and available in the atmosphere?

68. How does the vocabulary of soul and spirit clarify or complicate the account?

69. Which part of the chapter describes a visible material and which part offers an explanatory principle?

70. What would count as evidence that regeneration renews an origin rather than merely repeats an appearance?

Book I Chapter 6 Heaven and Its Influence

Read with: I.6.

71. What qualities make heaven the most active part of the elemental order?

72. How does heaven communicate with lower conditions through intervening media?

73. Why must ascending vapours meet descending influence?

74. What prevents the circulation from being described as a one-way gift from above?

75. How do rain, dew and atmospheric changes sustain the author’s account?

76. Why does the author compare the movement of elements with the passage of food and excrement?

77. How can what one body rejects nourish another body?

78. What connects the circulation described here with the above and below of the chain?

79. Which parts of the account could be observed, and which require an inference beyond observation?

80. How would the argument change if the lower world could receive influence but give nothing back?

Book I Chapter 7 Air and Its Influence

Read with: I.7.

81. Why is air a necessary medium between heaven and water?

82. What does the author mean by calling air a receptacle of soul and life?

83. How does the account distinguish air from the subtler condition beyond the atmosphere?

84. What relations among density, moisture and spirit explain changes in air?

85. Why does saturation lead to a downward movement?

86. How does the chapter connect respiration with a wider circulation?

87. What is gained by assigning air a reproductive role?

88. What difficulties arise from the German and Latin anatomical names given to air?

89. How should an editor preserve a disagreement between an anatomical word and its gloss?

90. Which relation in this chapter is most important for the later analysis of rainwater?

Book I Chapter 8 Water and Its Effluence

Read with: I.8.

91. Why are water and earth grouped together as receptive principles?

92. How does water mediate between air and earth?

93. What makes a medium compatible with the things it joins?

94. Why might a practitioner need more than one intervening medium?

95. How does the author connect the three kingdoms through nourishment?

96. What changes when plants are taken up into an animal body?

97. How do decay and absorption complete that account of nourishment?

98. What does the womb image add to the description of earth?

99. How should the claim of a common inward nature be distinguished from outward differences?

100. Which example best supports the chapter’s explanation of the passage between kingdoms?

Book I Chapter 9 Earth and Its Effluence

Read with: I.9.

101. How can earth be both the lowest element and a receptacle of celestial activity?

102. What is meant by calling earth coagulated or fixed heaven?

103. How does the chapter infer motion in things that appear still?

104. What connection is drawn between motion, heat and life?

105. How does a detached plant or mineral remain active in the author’s account?

106. Why are earthly vapours assigned both a twofold and a fourfold character?

107. How does one element act as another element’s magnet or solvent?

108. What difference does relative proximity to heaven or earth make to a vapour?

109. Where does the argument require an unobserved process beneath the earth?

110. How would you diagram the reciprocal movements in this chapter without erasing their intermediate stages?

Book I Chapter 10 the Universal Seed Made Manifest

Read with: I.10.

111. Why does rainwater become a privileged subject for examining the universal seed?

112. What does the order of separation reveal about the author’s three principles?

113. How are particular collected products connected with the universal argument?

114. What evidence is offered for identifying the fixed and active sides with salt and nitre?

115. How do the paired columns of the correspondence table organise the preceding account?

116. Which correspondence is a material claim and which is an analogy?

117. How do the father and mother images relate to agent and patient?

118. What does the comparison of hammer and anvil add to the table?

119. What would have to be shown to move from a result in collected water to a result in every natural body?

120. Which distinction in this chapter should guide your reading of the later demonstrations?

Book I Chapter 11 Nitre and Salt in Air and Natural Things

Read with: I.11.

121. What is the principal claim the chapter sets out to demonstrate?

122. How does the author connect the behaviour of particular materials with a universal principle?

123. What part does the distinction between volatile and fixed play in the argument?