of sensation and vegetation differ from intellectual faculties. Let it be so, if we wish: sensitive and vegetative spirits may be certain dispositions or aptitudes for receiving the soul, which uses them only as an instrument through which to act. This has caused them to be given the name [ethereal vehicle?]. They nevertheless differ from the soul as much as a worker from the tool, which cannot be called a worker. Everything above nature’s order is separated from the kind to which these spirits belong. What lies outside their family is assigned to the rational soul, then to the intellectual species, and finally to God. Although this spirit is ennobled with the title of a subtle and ethereal essence, it nevertheless savors of the dregs of the elements and partakes of matter, albeit its subtlest part; otherwise it would not be an intermediary for uniting souls with bodies, as we have said.

Finally, who, after the separation of rational soul and body, does not perceive these spirits which

prevent the dissolution of the corpse from which the compound’s form has been dispersed? We must therefore admit a distinction here between death—which God alone can reanimate, as we have said elsewhere—and mortification, which is a work of nature. Death is thus the complete dissolution both of the corpse enclosing the spirit and of the body in which the soul resides; everything remaining after it is nothing. Mortification, being only the separation of soul and body, leaves within the corpse some spirit that protects it from corruption: the balm in which life is contained, the principle of generation, nutrition, and increase, which knows no death because it is incorruptible, yet is the principle of all alteration and corruption, as we have said above.

Who can fail to recognize all the proofs of our bodies’ resurrection: through germinative spirits regenerating themselves to perpetuate fragile things; through material and individual forms reborn and never dying; through ideas of essential forms remaining after death, which cannot

be effaced; and finally through the nature of the soul, the inclinations of our spirit, which are incorruptible, and the instincts that make us anticipate immortality. But the reason is seen not only in these forms and their operations, but in matter itself: either the glorification and resurrection of bodies or the means of this resurrection or glorification. To discover them, let us do as in the preceding difficulties: have recourse to experience and let ourselves be guided by nature, which shows the way. By this means we shall discover certain vestiges of immortality and incorruptibility even in insensible things and in matter stripped of every kind of form. For if a compound is dissolved and stripped of its substance and accidental form, as when reduced to ash by fire, it assumes the first species of the first element, namely Earth; and nothing remains but calx or useless ash serving no purpose, because the germinative spirit accompanying the essential form, in which lies the most powerful principle of prolonging its life and

perpetuating species has withdrawn from it with its properties and powers; and only in these is the image and shadow of the first form seen. Since this spirit is incorruptible and constitutes the species of things, which cannot change, not being subject to sensible things, they are neither corrupted nor extinguished, but merely withdraw from the matter they desire to rejoin. It follows that when one has been destroyed, another is introduced that partakes greatly of the element and is more composed of it; or that at least, so far as it can, endeavors to clothe itself in qualities through which it may defend itself against annihilation. So that this should not happen in created things—otherwise it would be its irreparable loss—wise and provident nature planted within them, from the beginning of the world, certain fixed and eternal seeds of immortality, so that those of accidental forms might be dissolved or raised through the corruption and annihilation of these incorruptible spirits that might occur. After, therefore, the destruction of everything unable to resist the violence of fire, everything that

remains gives certain signs and proofs of its incorruptibility, and, as soon as it is put into fire, changes into glass, according to the axiom that everything deprived of its own moisture produces only a vitrifying fusion. Since fire therefore cannot act upon it or express its form because of its fixity and permanence, it makes every effort to draw from the bosom of its first father—that is, Heaven—an image and nature with its accidents, more suitably called certain qualities and conditions: for example, purity, light, fixity, and subtlety or at least the most marked penetrability. These are the glorious qualities of a renewed, glorified, and, so to speak, resurrected body, and even utilities full of seeds; a thing takes no rest in attracting them until it has acquired them.

Who, I ask, does not see at once with what solicitude the first mother of things tries to impress them upon her matter to make this precious stone? In this, art, following her, lavishes everything upon compounds, and even surpassing her

and accomplishes in a moment what nature would not accomplish in a thousand years. It surpasses her so greatly that it advances and raises its work to such a height of purity, subtlety, and penetrability that it can communicate to others the qualities with which it is endowed. Nature shows the difference between glorified bodies and those that glorify: in the former the glorious qualities are passive, while in the latter they are active. From this comes our Elixir, to which these glorious active qualities have been granted. We have called it the symbol and image of Jesus Christ’s resurrection, just as the bodies resurrected and essentialized through him signify the resurrection of the bodies of the faithful. Now, because our first spirits are incorruptible and volatile, upon which depend the generations of things, their alterations, corruptions, and nutritions, and those of our first quintessence, fixed, eternal, and incorruptible, upon which depend this renewal, regeneration, and glorification of things, he does not consider the seeds of immortality and incorruptibility that present themselves even before the ignorant. Enclosed in the center of the

earth and in the bosom of matter, they boast of having their whole Heaven within them and shine with the brilliance of their heavenly bodies, planets, and influences.

Those who have investigated the nature and matter of the heavens and planets, instructed by this astrology, have therefore not recognized matter as inferior, passing, and corruptible. Rather, they have believed what we said: that it is luminous, subtle, spiritual, and fixed insofar as it is hidden in earth’s center. They have also given it the qualities we attribute to the secret of our physical stone, which everything naturally strives to approach and which God will give to the whole world in the universal conflagration, so that it may endure eternally without alteration, corruption, or death. It was therefore fitting and proper that what serves to acquire a blessedness in this mortal life should not be denied to those who are to enjoy an eternal, immortal life filled with every kind of delight. This will lead someone to ask us, by way of objection, whether the elements, plants, animals, minerals, and everything that