The kinds of these three later elements are generated from the threefold marriage of the first three. Mercury is produced from the mixture of earth and water; sulphur from the embrace of earth and air; salt from the condensation of air and water. No further combinations of them are possible. Nature’s fire is present in all as a formal principle, through the inflowing and cooperating power of heavenly things.

Nor are the later bodies generated from just any conjunction of the earlier ones. Mercury comes forth from oily earth and clear water, thoroughly diluted and mixed. Sulphur is generated from the association of exceedingly subtle and dry earth with moist air. Finally, salt coagulates from gross, briny, saline water and raw air caught within it.

We may affirm that Democritus’s opinion, that all bodies are made from atoms, is not foreign to Nature, for reason and experience defend him against slander. That ingenious philosopher wished to veil the mixture of elements in obscure language without concealing it altogether. To agree with Nature’s intention, this mixture must take place through the smallest corpuscles, actually indivisible; otherwise the elements would not coalesce into a continuous natural body. Experience in the artificial resolution and composition of mixed bodies, practised through distillations, teaches us that a perfect mixture of two or more bodies occurs only in a subtle vapour. But Nature makes her own mixtures far subtler and in some measure spiritual, and it is sounder to believe that Democritus understood these. For the grossness of bodies obstructs mixture; therefore, the more things are attenuated, the fitter they become for mixture.

THE THREE HIGHEST KINDS OF MIXED BODIES.

A threefold degree of existence in mixed bodies presents their three highest kinds: minerals, plants, and animals. Nature’s law has granted minerals generation in earth; plants the striking of roots in earth and water; animals birth and feeding in earth, water, and air. Yet for all, air is the chief fuel and nourishment of life.

MINERALS.

Minerals are believed simply to exist rather than to live, although metals, the foremost among minerals, may in some measure be called endowed with life. One reason is that in their generation there occurs a kind of intercourse and mingling of two seeds, male and female—sulphur and mercury. Revolved through long and manifold circulation, purified, seasoned and fermented with Nature’s salt, and perfectly mixed in the subtlest vapour, those two are formed into mud and a soft mass, while the spirit of sulphur gradually congeals mercury. That mass at last solidifies and is strengthened into a metallic body.

Another reason is that metals, especially perfect ones, conceal within themselves a principle of life: an implanted fire poured in from heaven. Dulled beneath the metal’s hard rind, deprived of motion, it lies hidden like an enchanted treasure, until, gaining freedom through philosophical dissolution and the artist’s subtle ingenuity, it powerfully unfolds a subtle spirit and a heavenly soul through the motion of growth, and is finally exalted to the highest perfection of art and Nature.

Plants, however, also possess a soul or spirit of growth. Through the motion of growth they increase and multiply, but they lack sensation and animal movement. Their seeds are of a hermaphroditic nature, for each individual grain contains a fertile seed without intercourse or the mixture of two seeds, although experience teaches that both sexes are found in almost every kind of plant.

In the seeds of plants, too, God has hidden a secret spirit, the author of generation, marked with a character proper to the species. It is wholly heavenly, a ray of ethereal light free from corruption, in which the specific form is preserved beneath the body of each individual. When that body has been softened and resolved through corruption, the immortal spirit, called forth by the sun’s life-giving and homogeneous heat, rises into a new plant and transfers into it the form of the old.

ANIMALS.

Animals, beyond existence and the faculty of growth, excel through a sensitive soul, which is in them the principle of motion and life. Thus the animal, placed at the highest degree of lower things, completes Nature’s work in the elemental kingdom: it lives in the proper sense and begets in the proper sense. In it Nature has truly distinguished the two sexes so that from two a third may be produced, namely offspring. Thus in more perfect things the symbol of the Trinity shines more perfectly.