The Summary of Physics Restored

Moisture, Radical

The rooted, sustaining moisture through which life-related activity is received and bound within a compound. It is distinguished both from ordinary removable moisture and from innate heat. The word radical refers to a root, not to a modern free radical.

Motion

Natural activity or change, including processes not visible as a journey from one place to another. The author distinguishes a remission of action from its complete cessation and extends activity to apparently resting bodies.

Nature

The ordered power and administration of created things under their first cause. Nature can be personified as a governor, artisan or mother. Those images need not imply an independent deity separate from the book’s creator.

Quality

A way in which elemental or compound matter is disposed to act and receive action. The author treats qualities as instruments rather than the underlying efficient causes of action. Heat, cold, moisture and dryness are understood through proportion and temperament rather than simply as mutual enemies.

Salt

Salt appears as a material residue and bearer of powers in discussions of ashes, fertility and a persistent generative root, and as a secondary constituent principle alongside sulphur and mercury (canons 150–152). In canon 114, “salt of Nature” is also a name for the heavenly spirit called the fifth element. The historical category is wider than one modern salt; extraction or presence alone does not prove a universal medical claim.

Seed

A concentrated generative principle that carries the capacity for a particular kind of offspring. Seed is linked with a suitable matrix and formative power, rather than with matter considered in complete isolation.

Soul

The informing and life-giving principle of an individual compound. The text distinguishes this function from spirit as mediator. A claim about the soul of a compound should not automatically be transferred to every theological claim about the human soul.

Spirit

A subtle nature whose function depends on context. In the account of individual life it mediates between soul and body as a vehicle and bond; elsewhere the word extends to fine material natures, fire, light and transmitted powers. It is not a synonym for soul, a ghost, or a modern chemical spirit in every occurrence.

Sun

A celestial source of light and life-related influence within the author’s system. The Sun’s varying relation to lower things also explains seasonal difference and changes of temperament.

Temperament

A proportionate disposition of the elements and their qualities in a compound. It belongs to the account of concord, disorder and disease; a modern reader should not confuse it with personality alone.

Water

A receiving, flowing and connecting material nature, also used in the speculative reading of the waters of Genesis. The author distinguishes familiar water from primordial moisture and from the enigmatic dry water; one definition cannot settle all three uses.

Will

The faculty of operation or willing, distinguished from intellect in the last canon. The author relates goodness, justice and mercy to divine will and gives created intelligible beings limited analogous faculties.