Whoever seeks the simple elements of bodies, separated from every mixture, torments himself with vain labour, for they are unknown to human understanding. What are commonly regarded as elements are by no means simple, but inseparably mixed with one another. Earth, water and air are more truly integral parts of the universe than elements, though they may rightly be called the elements' matrices.

THE ELEMENTS.

The bodies of earth, water and air, sensibly distinguished in their own spheres, are different from the elements that nature uses in generation and that constitute the bodies of compounds. In mixture these are imperceptible through their fineness and hidden from the senses until they come together into dense matter and a body:

For acknowledge that all things consist of imperceptible principles.

Those that constitute the universe's lower globe, however, are excluded from the law of perfect generation as too dense, crude, impure and undigested. They are images and likenesses of the elements rather than true elements.

* Lucretius, book 2.

Although the elements that nature the modeller uses in her mixtures and in shaping bodies cannot be detected before mixture, once the work is finished and the compound perfected its parts may be called by the same names, since they correspond by a certain proportion to the world's parts and are in a way analogous. One may call the more solid parts earth, the moister parts water, the spiritual parts air, and innate heat nature's fire. The hidden and essential powers may aptly be called celestial and astral natures, or quintessence. In this way every compound will by analogy glory in the name microcosm.

He who established the first elements for the generation of things alone knows how to compose individual things from them and resolve what has been composed back into them.

Let those who torment themselves in working upon nature's elements, trying to produce some body from them or resolve a naturally produced body into them, therefore not shun the light. Those elements belong wholly to nature's dominion and have been subject to her alone from their birth, utterly unknown to art and human industry.

An element of nature may be called a most simple portion of first matter, distinguished by its own specific difference and qualities and constituting an essential part in the material composition of compounds.

By nature's elements are understood material principles, some purer and more perfect than others according to the greater and more powerful efficacy of the form that perfects them. They differ chiefly in rarity and density: those that are rarer and closer to spiritual nature are purer and lighter, and more suited to movement and action.

Venerable antiquity imagined that the empire of the whole world was divided among three brothers, Saturn's sons and coheirs, because it recognised only three elemental natures, or more truly three parts of the universe. By omnipotent Jupiter, who received dominion over heaven, armed with the three-forked thunderbolt and superior to his brothers, those initiates into secrets understood the ethereal region of celestial bodies, claiming authority over these lower things. Over the lowest region of heaven, or our air, they set Jupiter's wife Juno, because that region is tainted with vapours, moist and cold, in a way impure, and close to a female temperament. It is also subject to the decrees of higher things, receives their influences and communicates them to us, mingling with grosser natures and bending them to the purposes of the heavenly ones. Since male and female differ only in sex, not in species, they did not regard air or the lower heaven as an entirely different element, distinct in essence and species from the upper heaven, but as differing only in place and accidents. To Neptune, divinity of the sea, they assigned authority over the waters. By Pluto, the wealthy tyrant of the underworld, they signified the globe of earth, filled with riches. The desire for these, and for honours, and the heat of every craving bitterly torment human minds. Those wise men therefore admitted only three parts of the universe, or, if one wishes, three elements, because they intended the element fire to be included within ethereal nature. For that reason they depicted Jupiter armed with the thunderbolt.

Experience teaches us that all compound bodies are resolved by analysis into dry and moist, and that all animal excretions end in those same distinctions. From this it is clearly evident that compound bodies are made from only two sensible elements, corresponding to earth and water, though the others are present in them in power and potentiality. Air, or the element of the lower heaven, escapes the senses because in relation to us it belongs in a certain way to the order of spiritual things. Nature's fire too, being a formal principle, cannot be detected and separated by any analytic destruction or ingenuity of art. For the nature of forms is not subject to the judgement of the senses, because it is spiritual.

Earth is the densest of the universe's bodies and is therefore regarded as the heaviest and as its centre. Against common opinion, we must hold that its nature is cold in itself and dry accidentally, because it retains more of first matter's opaque and dark nature. Shadow and darkness are hiding places of cold; hence they flee light and stand diametrically opposed to it. Because of its extreme density earth is the mother of shadow and darkness, difficult for light and heat to penetrate, and therefore stiffens with the greatest cold. For this reason black bile must be regarded as the coldest humour of all, because it is subject to earth's dominion, while earth is subject to Saturn, held to be the author of the cold and melancholic temperament. Moreover, things generated from earthy substance in the earth's entrails, such as marble and stones, are cold in nature. Metals must be judged differently, however, because they are of a more airy nature and contain much fire, through sparks of nature's fire poured in from heaven and a sulphurous spirit congealing their moist and cold matter. Mercury, exceeding the others in moisture and cold, owes its coldness to earth and its moisture to water. It is otherwise with things produced in the sea, as is sufficiently evident from ambar, coral and many other products of sea and rivers, which possess a hot temperament. Reason and experience therefore teach us that the greatest cold belongs to earth, not water.