The Summary of Physics Restored

186The perceptible seeds of things, and the mixed bodies born from them, consist of a threefold nature: heavenly, elemental, and [an intermediary]. From Heaven they have within them a ray of sunlight clothed in every ethereal power: the principle of action, movement, generation and life, and form in potentiality. Through its benefit seeds imitate the constancy of the stars by their reviving power. Like immortal shoots of heavenly plants grafted upon corruptible nature as upon a foreign stock, they rescue it from death through a kind of everlasting succession. The elemental portion, bodily and perceptible, which in animals is called sperm, is the seed’s guardian and capsule. This portion putrefies and decays, while the invisible seed generates. Radical moisture, or Nature’s ferment, to which the spirit adheres, is an intermediate substance joining the heavenly and elemental natures. On its material side it corresponds to the elements, and on its spiritual side to form. It resembles dawn, which, suffused with dusky light, joins the extremes of light and shadow and, being neither, displays a mixture of both.