Just as the Sun, standing midway among the other Planets, irradiates them with its light, fills them with power and brings them into life’s harmony through its life-giving spirit, so the Solar spirit in the midst of elemental Nature pours light into her and, in the work of generation, gathers, unites and quickens the Elements.

The first Agent in the world is Nature’s Fire. Having its seat in the Solar globe, it diffuses life-giving heat through the Sun’s rays into Nature’s entire dominion, conveying with itself the capacity for activity into seeds and establishing in them the principle of motion and action. When this is removed, every capacity for motion, action and life ceases.

Nature’s heat and Nature’s light are in reality the same, for they flow continually and uniformly from the same source, namely the Sun; but they are distinguished by their office. The task of heat is to penetrate nature’s inward parts, while light makes her outward parts manifest. Heat moves the hidden natures of things; light merely presents their perceptible accidents to the eyes. The Sun’s rays perform both. The Sun is therefore nature’s first instrument, by whose approach and retreat all nature’s operations are variously governed, intensified and abated through light and heat.

The second universal Agent is that same light, yet not flowing immediately from its source, but reflected from dense bodies illuminated by it, such as the heavenly bodies and indeed the Earth itself. For Solar light, striking those bodies, moves their dispositions and faculties and is altered by contact with them. Through the reflection of its rays it diffuses their differing powers throughout the whole expanse of Heaven and our Air. Carried in those rays as in vehicles, the varied conditions of so many bodies are scattered everywhere for the preservation and harmony of universal Nature; we have called these influences. These are Nature’s true and first Elements. Since they are spiritual, they communicate themselves to us under an airy or even a watery nature. To their beneficence, as to the roots of the Elements, every offspring and gift of life is owed.

LOVE, NATURE’S GENIUS.

Love, called by Plato the oldest of the Gods, was breathed by the divine Spirit into newborn Nature and set over her character as her Genius. In the first division of the Universe he delivered the judgement for partitioning the inheritance among the first-born brothers; afterwards he exercised command over the generation of things.

Nature’s Author established the first bond of Love in natural things between first matter and universal form, heaven and earth, light and darkness, Poros and Penia—that is, abundance and want—and the beautiful and the deformed. The second degree of love flowed from that first coupling, as though from the embrace of parents, into the Elements. Bound to one another in a brotherly spirit, they divided Nature’s entire domain in the best order. The third and last degree is completed in compounds, which are carried towards the propagation and multiplication of their like by little fires of love implanted and engendered within them by Nature. Divine Love established this threefold bond of love in created things as a magical knot, so that he might extend himself, as though through propagating shoots, into every part of his workmanship, together and individually. For Love is the basis of the Universe, the cube of Nature, and the firmest bond between things above and below.

CONTRARIETY IS ABSENT FROM THE ELEMENTS.

Let those who enslave Nature’s harmonious movements to discord seek cover. For in acting, Nature works wholly in peace and goodwill; indeed, in generating she is aroused with desire. The very Elements of things, when they come together, melt wholly into lust, so that they may grow together through mutual embraces and become one from many.

* Chapter 9, book 1, On Nature.

Let the Academy rise again to explain to us how first matter can be the primary subject of contraries, and how love can rest amid the quarrels and battles of adversaries—that love, or vehement appetite, which the Academy’s chief* acknowledged to be situated in the heart of that same matter, so that she desires form no less than a woman desires a man. Will not those enemies, constituting the seeds of things and the bodies of compounds, overthrow love and harmony by fighting forever?

Those who establish desire between matter and form, but hatred and opposition within matter itself and the elements, contradict themselves most completely in this positing of contraries. For in all generated beings, the human being alone excepted, form is drawn from the potentiality or hidden power of matter, according to the doctrine of that same Academy. Yet how can this happen except through love? If matter suffers the divisions of contraries at its root, will not form too, emerging from its deep root, feel the same force—indeed, be crushed in its very cradle? What sane person, then, at the very point when the Elements are mingled and matter is formed, would set those gladiators over the marriage of Love and Nature? Who would expect uniform offspring, rather than monstrous offspring, from such heterogeneous seed of resisting parents?