One versed in nature's secrets will not deny that this secondary nature, the servant of the first, is the spirit of the universe, or the life-giving power, endowed with hidden fertility, of the light created in the beginning and gathered into the solar body. Zoroaster and Heraclitus called that fiery spirit invisible fire and the soul of the world.

Nature's order is nothing other than an unfolded sequence of eternal laws, ordained by the supreme prince and written out across many pages for his countless peoples of varied nature. Under their authority the mass of the universe performs its movements. Life and death alternately occupy the outer margins of the last volume; everything else is movement towards one or the other.

The world is like a craftsman's work turned into a circle; its parts are like the links of a chain, clasping one another in mutual embraces. Nature sits in their midst as deputy, administering the changes of things, while the maker is present everywhere like a craftsman continually repairing the worn links.

THE WORLD.

As the totality of the world consists of a threefold nature, so it is distinguished into three regions: the supercelestial, celestial and subcelestial. The supercelestial, called intelligible, is highest of all, wholly spiritual and immortal, nearest to divine majesty. The celestial occupies the middle place. Having received the lot of the most perfect bodies and abounding in spirits, it pours forth countless powers and life-giving breaths through spiritual rivulets. It cannot undergo corruption, yet is not exempt from change when its period is at last completed. Finally, the subcelestial region, commonly called elemental, occupies the world's lowest tract. Since it is wholly corporeal in itself, it possesses spiritual gifts and benefits, the highest of which is life, only on loan and with repayment due to heaven. Within its bosom no generation occurs without corruption, no arising without passing away.

The law of creation provides that lower things obey intermediate things, intermediates obey higher things, and the higher obey their supreme ruler directly at his nod. This is the order and symmetry of the whole universe.

Just as the creator of things alone was permitted to create from nothing whatever pleased him, so he alone has the right to turn created things into nothing. For whatever is stamped with the character of being or substance is forbidden by nature's law to fall away from it and return to non-being. Trismegistus therefore rightly held that nothing in the world dies, but all things pass over and are changed. Compounds are composed of elements and through nature's wheel are resolved again into their own elements.

To this is added that nature dissolves each thing back into its own bodies, and does not destroy things into nothing.

* In the Pimander.

* Lucretius, book 2.

Philosophers believed in a certain first matter older than the elements, but because they knew little of it, they explained little, and that as though through a cloud. It is without qualities and accidents, yet their first subject; empty of quantity, yet that through which all things have quantity; simple, yet the seat of contraries; unknown to the senses, yet the basis of sensible things; extended everywhere, yet perceived nowhere; always desiring forms, holding none; the root of all bodies, yet something that can be conceived only by an operation of the mind and cannot be sensed. In short, it is actually nothing, potentially everything. Thus they posited a fictitious and shadowy foundation of nature.

FIRST MATTER.

Aristotle was more cautious. Although he believed the world eternal, he indicated a certain first and universal matter, avoiding its windings and discussing it soberly and ambiguously. He says it is better to posit one and the same inseparable matter of all things, though distinguished in thought, from which the first bodies and the other things perceived by sense consist. It is their first principle and inseparable from them, yet always joined with opposition, underlying contraries and giving rise to the elements.