How much this spiritual food contributes to animal life is shown by continual breathing, or drawing in outside air, which compels even an ordinary person to acknowledge it. Nature did not skilfully construct her bellows near the heart merely to cool it, as physicians commonly suppose. She also made them so that through their repeated fanning they might breathe in the ethereal air and offer the heart ethereal spirits to drink. By the breathing in and reception of these, the vital spirits are restored and multiplied.

Philosophers call spiritual natures not only those created apart from matter and comprehended by intellect alone, such as the Intelligences, Angels and Daemons are believed to be. They also include natures which, though deriving their origin from matter, escape the examination of the senses through their extreme fineness and nobility. Close to purely spiritual beings, they are perceived more by reason than by sense. Such natures are pure air or ether, the influences of heavenly bodies, innate fire, seminal spirits, plant, animal and vital spirits, and others of this kind. In these the very nature of things consists more truly than in gross bodies. Such natures derive their lineage from Heaven and, in comparison with perceptible things, claim the name and standing of spirits.

NATURE’S FIRE IS SPIRITUAL

Nature’s fire should be numbered among spiritual things, for in itself it cannot be perceived by any sense. It reveals itself in bodies through heat and other effects and accidents, as is evident in animals, into which the imperceptible fire of Nature pours perceptible heat. When that fire silently withdraws and life goes with it, the elemental body or corpse remains whole and uninjured, although the mixed body has been dissolved. In plants, however, because this fire is weaker, it eludes sense and does not allow itself to be felt through heat.

COMMON FIRE IS AMONG SPIRITUAL THINGS.

Reason establishes that common fire too belongs to the class of spiritual rather than bodily things. If it were bodily, it would have a body of its own, inseparable from itself, no less than earth, water, air and the other perceptible natures. These consist in and are bounded by their own bodies; in and through those bodies they exist, exercise their powers and present themselves to sense. Fire, however, has no perceptible body of its own and resides only in another’s. A coal is not fire but burning wood, nor is flame fire but kindled smoke. In a word, this robber always feeds upon what belongs to others. It lives on plunder and is extinguished when that fails, having nothing within itself on which to feed. Moreover, a body added to a body increases quantity, but fire added to wood or smoke does not do so. Neither wood nor smoke is increased in quantity by the addition of fire. It therefore becomes clear that a spirit, rather than a fiery body, invades wood or smoke. A sword melted while its sheath remains untouched, and bones broken while the flesh remains uninjured by the fiery bolt of a hurled thunderbolt, sufficiently show that even lightning’s fire has a spiritual nature. Yet we must admit that fire is not wholly immaterial. It consists of exceedingly fine matter, through which it adheres to the surrounding air, and hence can be held by coarser matter. It therefore deserves the name of spirit rather than body, because it lacks perceptible quantity and cannot be apprehended unless it puts on another body.

LIGHT AMONG SPIRITUAL THINGS.

The origin of light establishes that it must be numbered among truly spiritual things. Before first matter was informed and the World arose, there was no light outside God. As Nature came into being, spiritual light began to flow from the fiery Spirit of Divinity into matter and to adhere to it as to a wick. This was the creation and origin of light, the first action of divinity in matter, the first marriage of Creator with creature and of spirit with body. Primary, informing light was therefore pure spirit. Through its fiery power, as though through heat, it kindled the neighbouring, intensely rarefied matter with its spiritual radiance, thus turning darkness into light. Heaven, distinguished by the first light, is nevertheless wholly invisible, though material and fiery, because on the side of matter it has attained the highest degree of fineness, while on the side of form it is spiritual. In the middle Heaven, however, the light that had been scattered was gathered into a bounded compass and passed into the solar globe. This had to become somewhat dense, like smoke that can be kindled but cannot be consumed, so that, lit by immortal light, it might hold that light and present itself to universal Nature as a torch or mass of flame. Solar light is therefore nothing other than a luminous spirit deriving its origin from the spirit of eternal light. It is joined to its own body as form and inheres in it inseparably, becoming perceptible through that body’s density. It communicates radiance and much of its power to all the natures of the Universe. By its constant flow it constitutes the spirit of the Universe, assigned to a body for the benefit and preservation of bodily Nature.

The solar rays that meet our eyes are not, however, pure spirits. As they continually issue from the Sun, they proceed clothed in the surrounding ether, which is congenial to them. They are thus nothing other than a continuous flow of spirits of light. Flowing constantly like little streams from their perennial source and entering ethereal nature as flame enters exceedingly fine smoke, they scatter radiance in every direction across the whole breadth of the World.

It is the nature of light to flow unceasingly from its source. We call those emissary spirits that mingle with ethereal nature rays: they are the first activity of light and the vehicle of radiance. For it belongs to a luminous body to act through rays and emit heat and brilliance, pouring light far and wide around it through the projection and multiplication of rays. Let us use lux simply to express the primary activity of a luminous body, and lumen the secondary activity that flows from the first.

When a candle is consumed or blown out by a strong wind, the fiery and luminous spirit that kindles its wick and smoke does not perish or become extinguished, as people commonly suppose. Deprived of its food or torn away from it, it is dispersed into the air and vanishes. Air is the abyss and universal receptacle of lights and spiritual natures in the material World. This teaches us that radiance has a spiritual nature and flows from a spiritual source, just as natural forms flow from their womb, which is the spirit of the Universe flowing constantly from the Sun as from its immortal source. Just as the bodies of mixed things, when coming into being, flow from first matter and the elements, and when perishing gradually fall back into those same principles, so the natural forms of individuals flow, as they arrive, from universal form. This, as the form of forms, breathes formative power into seeds; as they depart, they flow back into it. That form is the spirit of the Universe’s light, to which all solitary forms and sparks of light released from bodily bonds likewise return as to their own principle and a nature of the same kind. Thus all mixed bodies are resolved into their principles, while those principles return to the perennial source of their nature as to their own centre or homeland.

THE SPIRIT OF THE UNIVERSE.