The Summary of Physics Restored

220We may suspect that this root of Nature, which survives when its mixed body falls into ruin, is a vestige and a most pure and immortal portion of first matter, informed and marked with the divine character of light. For that most ancient marriage of first matter with its form, from which the other bodily elements took their origin, is indissoluble. Indeed, an incorruptible foundation of corruptible things, a kind of cubic root, ever enduring and immortal, had to lie hidden in the depths of bodies. It provides a stable and perpetual material principle possessing the potentiality and aptitude for life, around which, as around an unmoving axis, the alternation of elements and things may take place. And if we may venture a probable conjecture in obscure matters, that immortal substance is the foundation of the material World and the ferment of its immortality. The eternal Weigher of things ordained that it should survive on the day of universal conflagration, after the elements have been purified by the trial of fire, so that from pure and stable matter he might renew and restore his work, delivered from original sin and the stain of corruption, into eternal glory.