The Summary of Physics Restored

188Mixed bodies have the roots of their generation and life in Heaven, from which their causes and principles flowed. From there too, like inverted trees, they draw sap and nourishment. The intellect does not deserve to be enslaved to the authority of the senses, which judge only perceptible things. The mind reaches far beyond the boundaries of the senses and searches more deeply into Nature’s territories. Bodies are like rinds: the coarser parts of the elements and the accidents of things. Beneath them lie hidden pure and effective essences that do not acknowledge the senses as their judge. These essences had to be clothed in a kind of dense cloud to migrate from the heavenly realm into this earthly province of bodily things. The supreme Creator of Nature ordained this marriage of spiritual and bodily things, so that his uncreated Spirit, first communicating itself to spiritual and simpler natures, might descend through them as intermediaries into bodily natures. Thus, pouring itself out by degrees and in order through every region of the World, through all things together and each individually, it might sustain the whole work by the presence of divinity. It was also so that the imperceptible Creator might be apprehended by the perceptible creature through bodily and perceptible images.