The Summary of Physics Restored

128Yet those two neighbouring natures do not undergo a true and essential interchange. They change only in a certain respect, not wholly but in a qualified way, and that exchange occurs only in the lowest region of air, bounded by the vault of the clouds. It does not reach the middle region, much less the upper one. Water, becoming vapour through rarefaction, flies up and is raised into air rather than converted into it; that vapour, condensed and resolved into water, falls back. Antiquity called this circulation and return into itself of a single nature the conversion of two, guided more by the deception of sense than by the light of understanding. To one searching all Nature’s secrets with lynx-like eyes, things are found to stand otherwise. Whoever simply calls even the thinnest vapour air is also mistaken, for vapour is a certain intermediate and imperfect body between the twofold waters, upper and lower—our water and air—yet is neither. However much it is rarefied, it will never be exalted to the lofty rank of airy nobility: it will become spurious air, not natural and legitimate air. Nor will the clear nature of air sink so low and depart so far from its purity as to thicken into vapour, cloud, or water. Nature has received no right to erase or displace through a new confusion that primeval separation of the waters, which the Architectonic Spirit made truly and actually, or the established boundaries of the world’s parts, which the Lord marked with his indelible seal.