The Summary of Physics Restored

222That tiny spark of the earlier light which informed the dark matter of the lower abyss in the beginning can suffice for the generation of insects. It stirs matter with a confused and disordered movement, bringing it from potentiality into a feeble actuality. But matter, warmed by this little fire, resembles a languishing female, corrupted more by the image of a male than by union with one. It rushes into desire and, unequal to conceiving Nature’s legitimate offspring, fashions for itself in excrements and putrid things unclean phantoms and likenesses of animals, such as worms, drones, beetles and the like. Radical moisture is therefore the immediate and unfailing subject of generation and life. In well-disposed and ordered matter, Nature’s Fire and formal actuality are first kindled in it. In confused and disordered matter, however, where that moisture takes the male’s place, it procures Nature’s spurious and illegitimate offspring. For generation without specific seed seems to occur more by chance or error than by Nature’s design, although even in it there takes place a dim and undifferentiated union of active with passive principles, necessary for producing any mixed body, however imperfect.