Let the philosopher cease seeking the cause of the alteration of the Elements and the corruption and frailty of compounds in the opposition of the Elements. Let him instead lay the blame on the poverty and weakness of first matter. For in ancient Chaos it was not the case that Cold things fought with hot, moist things with dry, as is commonly believed. Only two of those four qualities were within it, and they were by no means opposed: coldness and moisture, fitting the female and matter. The other two, heat and dryness, which are masculine and formal, proceeded from the forming light. Only after the retreat of the waters and the arrival of light was the earth called Dry Land; before that it had been moist and subject to the waters.

Right reason therefore teaches that those four qualities, which the common view regards as opposed, did not exist in first matter until after it received form. Nor did it suffer contrariety in its solitude. Its diseases were different: opacity, confusion, deformity, coldness, undigested moisture and powerlessness—all signs of a diseased and languishing body. It was therefore infected from its creation with a taint of corruption, which it transmitted to its children and grandchildren dwelling in this lowest and weakest region of the Elements. For this reason Genesis does not declare that dark Abyss to be very good; that praise was rightly reserved for light and the other things created afterwards.

What sane person would suspect that quarrelling and strife flowed from form into matter after those four qualities were united in formed matter? For it belongs to the essence and purpose of form to perfect matter and compose it into harmony, concord and a temperament as perfect as its powers allow.

The first things opposed through hostile qualities were light and darkness. Two qualities were present in light, heat and dryness, and as many in darkness, coldness and moisture; they were wholly opposed to one another because they were intense. But after those two most ancient principles of Nature came together, and the dark, material and feminine principle was formed and impregnated with light by the bright, formal and masculine principle, all the matter of the Universe and all its regions received the grace of light, distinguished, however, by their own degrees and differences. For that fiery tincture of the luminous Spirit left nothing unpenetrated. The four qualities too, previously intense but abated through mixture in formed matter, grew together most aptly, entered into friendship and agreed upon a temperament. Thus, now harmonious, they passed into the homogeneous family of the Elements, so that thereafter nothing hostile or resistant might remain in the generation of compounds to disturb Nature’s tranquil motion.

CONTRARIETY PROCEEDS FROM THE INTENSITY OF QUALITIES.

Nor are those four chief qualities opposed to one another in Nature: they are merely dissimilar and different. They do not overthrow one another, but unite and come together in a close alliance. Thus, at an abated degree, heat and cold meet amicably and mingle in a subject to produce an intermediate, temperate quality, namely warmth. If at an intense degree they encounter one another with struggle and combat, this proceeds from the excess and tyranny of intensity, which cannot endure two equally intense and opposing qualities as partners and sharers in the same dominion without turmoil. Nature, however, rejects intense qualities as spurious and foreign.

THE QUALITIES OF THE ELEMENTS ARE ABATED.

Let no one imagine, then, that Nature admits intense fire into the family of her Elements. Such fire would destroy rather than generate and would act against Nature, who shuns violence and delights in temperate things, from which all battle and contrariety are absent. Nature’s dominion does not endure the fury of scorching heat or devastating cold, nor the excess of wet or dry; it rests gently in temperateness. Therefore let no one seek intense qualities in the Elements of things: he will find them abated in greater or lesser degree.

Whoever calls hot and cold, wet and dry, simply contraries is therefore mistaken. For Earth, which Aristotle establishes as supremely dry, would oppose Air, which he regards as supremely moist. Water, likewise intensely cold, would oppose intensely hot Fire in his account. This opposition would confine each of the common Elements, or each region of the World, within the boundaries of its own sphere and exclude it from the dwelling and dominion of its contrary through antipathy. Reason and experience, however, teach us that things are otherwise. Pits and underground hollows, indeed the Earth’s very entrails and pores, are filled with air. The Earth’s inward moisture, by which all plants are nourished as by their mother’s own milk, is nothing other than warm and moist air clinging most closely to the Earth and imparting a fostering and nourishing power to her. The earth’s pores are her breasts and the airy moisture their milk, with which she, the parent and nurse of things, feeds her offspring and gives them growth.

Those who establish the four Elements in as many humours acknowledge that moist nature can receive the four elemental qualities—indeed, is their subject. How, then, do they profess those qualities to be contraries when they place them in the same subject? Although the four humours are distinguished by their differences, they have a single basis common to all and the same root, namely moisture. Yellow bile, which represents fire, is no less a humour than phlegm, which they assign to Water; and let the same judgement apply to black bile and blood, even though they mingle the four Elements in moisture comparatively rather than absolutely.

Aeneid 6.

If there were any opposition among Nature’s qualities and Elements, the greatest would occur between hot and cold, and next between Water and Fire. But the manifold generation that takes place beneath the waters sufficiently proves that the natures of fire and water do not oppose one another. For wherever there are generation and life, fire must be present as their proximate, inward, efficient cause, moving and altering matter towards generation: From it come the race of men and herds, and the life of winged creatures, and the monsters the Sea bears beneath its marble surface; fiery is their vigour, and heavenly the origin of those seeds.