Twofold moisture lies hidden in every mixed body: elemental and radical. Elemental moisture, which is partly watery and partly airy in nature, yields to fire and flies off as smoke or vapour. When it is exhausted, the body is reduced to ashes, for through it the elements are bound together in their mixture as with glue. Radical moisture, however, disdains the tyranny of common fire. It neither fails under torment nor departs in flight, but survives the mixed body and clings tenaciously to its ashes. This is evidence of perfect purity.

GLASS IS MADE FROM RADICAL MOISTURE.

Experience has taught glassmakers unversed in Nature’s affairs the secret of radical moisture hidden in ashes. By drawing glass from ashes through the keenness of their penetrating melting flame, they make the hidden manifest. Beyond this, neither the powers of art nor those of fire can extend or drive out the matter. The ashes must flow if they are to become a continuous quantity and solid body such as glass; and flowing cannot take place without moisture. That moisture, inseparable from its matter, is therefore finally brought into that noble transparent body, which is almost ethereal.

RADICAL MOISTURE ADHERES TO ASH.

The extraction of salts from ashes, in which the chief power of mixed bodies resides, and the increased fertility of fields after the burning and reduction of stubble to ash are the surest signs that this moisture, left untouched by fire, is the radical principle of generation and the foundation of Nature. Yet that power lies solitary and ineffective in the ashes themselves until, received by Earth, the common womb of Nature’s principles, it unfolds its hidden capacity suited to generation and multiplication, as also happens in the seeds of things.

This radical balsam is Nature’s ferment, permeating the whole mass of the body. It is an indelible and multiplying tincture, for it penetrates and tinges even the foulest excrements. Evidence of this is the frequent generation arising from them, although imperfect, and also the manuring of fields, familiar even to unlearned farmers, by which sluggish fields are urged to repay their owner’s loan with interest.

RADICAL MOISTURE IS THE ROOT OF THE MATERIAL WORLD.

We may suspect that this root of Nature, which survives when its mixed body falls into ruin, is a vestige and a most pure and immortal portion of first matter, informed and marked with the divine character of light. For that most ancient marriage of first matter with its form, from which the other bodily elements took their origin, is indissoluble. Indeed, an incorruptible foundation of corruptible things, a kind of cubic root, ever enduring and immortal, had to lie hidden in the depths of bodies. It provides a stable and perpetual material principle possessing the potentiality and aptitude for life, around which, as around an unmoving axis, the alternation of elements and things may take place. And if we may venture a probable conjecture in obscure matters, that immortal substance is the foundation of the material World and the ferment of its immortality. The eternal Weigher of things ordained that it should survive on the day of universal conflagration, after the elements have been purified by the trial of fire, so that from pure and stable matter he might renew and restore his work, delivered from original sin and the stain of corruption, into eternal glory.

It is clear that this radical foundation does not belong to the class of particular forms, because every individual has its own singular and individual form. When the mixed body is dissolved, that form withdraws from the body, while the radical principle remains unextinguished, though much weakened and of little efficacy because of form’s absence. Certain little vital fires nevertheless remain in it, capable of producing baser and imperfect offspring. Such production is not so much Nature’s birth as the birth of matter, which strives to generate but cannot do so without a mate because the formative and specific power is absent. Thus, through lack of seed, the corpse of a human being or horse can generate not a human being or horse but foul worms and certain insects. Hence we may suspect that this feeble principle of life proceeds from the poverty of first matter and belongs more to the family of lower elements than to the higher and heavenly ones, while nevertheless containing some tincture of light.

That tiny spark of the earlier light which informed the dark matter of the lower abyss in the beginning can suffice for the generation of insects. It stirs matter with a confused and disordered movement, bringing it from potentiality into a feeble actuality. But matter, warmed by this little fire, resembles a languishing female, corrupted more by the image of a male than by union with one. It rushes into desire and, unequal to conceiving Nature’s legitimate offspring, fashions for itself in excrements and putrid things unclean phantoms and likenesses of animals, such as worms, drones, beetles and the like. Radical moisture is therefore the immediate and unfailing subject of generation and life. In well-disposed and ordered matter, Nature’s Fire and formal actuality are first kindled in it. In confused and disordered matter, however, where that moisture takes the male’s place, it procures Nature’s spurious and illegitimate offspring. For generation without specific seed seems to occur more by chance or error than by Nature’s design, although even in it there takes place a dim and undifferentiated union of active with passive principles, necessary for producing any mixed body, however imperfect.

RADICAL MOISTURE IS THE BOND OF MATTER AND FORM.

That radical ferment, remaining constantly in the depths of mixed bodies, seems to be the bond of the marriage contracted between light and darkness, first matter and universal form—in a word, between contraries—and the seat and receptacle of forms in mixed bodies. Otherwise matter and form could not grow together because their natures are almost opposed. Yet first matter’s dark fierceness and aversion to light were tamed, and its hatred turned to love, through the benefit of that first luminous tincture which reconciles opposites.