Elementated things

Use in the book

The immediate example is the carnation. The author follows flower to plant and seed, then says that opening the little seed reveals only a little water and earth (pp. 139-140, II.139.2). This observation is used to support the seed’s elemental origin. It is not yet a declaration that the seed’s water is the correct beginning of the philosophical work.

The next paragraph sharply forbids that inference (p. 140, II.140.1). Such waters are not Elementa but Elementata; a universal medicine cannot be prepared from them. The argument’s movement is therefore from composition to a restriction on practical selection. Discovering the elements in a thing and possessing a suitable universal subject are different achievements.

Part I had already prepared this distinction through the products of chymical analysis (pp. 12-13, I.012.1). Vegetable materials yield vegetable water, oil and salt; minerals yield principles belonging to their particular metals. The process does not by itself carry those products back to universal prime matter. The names Mercury, Sulphur and Salt can recur without guaranteeing that each named fraction has the same scope as the philosophical principles in their universal state.²⁰

The distinction also clarifies the earlier theoretical regress from a human being through seed, blood, chyle and bread, and from bread through grain and earth to water (pp. 11-12, I.011.1). Reason can trace dependence upon a common source. The author nevertheless denies that practical resolution of any given particular restores that common source in a universally usable condition. Elementata gives a compact name to the obstacle that this difference creates.

Nor does the author solve the difficulty by rejecting all particular properties as unreal. He continually treats plant kinds, mineral conditions and their powers as consequential. The problem is their restriction. Once a subject is specified, its watery components belong to that determinate nature and cannot simply be relabeled universal because their ultimate origin is shared.

This makes the entry a useful check on casual reading of the phrase everything is water. In the book that claim coexists with severe exclusions of aqueous materials. A plant extract may illustrate elemental origin while failing to meet the proposed art’s requirements. The same evidence can support one conclusion and fail to support another without the author intending a contradiction.

Places to read

1. Part II · II.139.2; II.140.12Carnation seed and the explicit Elementa/Elementata distinction.
2. Part I · I.011.1; I.012.12Theoretical return to origin distinguished from practical recovery.

Translation

Elementata is translated as things constituted from elements rather than simply compounds. Compounds could invite an unexamined modern account of chemical bonding that the passage does not provide. Constituted emphasizes the author’s contrast with the common principles without assigning a present-day molecular identity.

Elementated things is correspondingly a reading label, not an assertion that the author uses an exact German noun of that form. The attested Latin plural supplies the lexical evidence.

Connections

Matter prime examines why the meaning of reduction also varies with the subject and with philosophical usage. Universal and particular explains the restricted power of what has already been specified. Together these entries distinguish origin, present constitution and operative suitability, three questions that should not be collapsed into one.

Cautions

Do not infer that Elementata are merely false appearances or that their components are chemically unreal. They are excluded because their nature and power are already particularized in the author’s account.

The distinction is about the selection of a universal subject. It does not forbid every use of a particular remedy, which the book elsewhere acknowledges under particular preparations and the orders of medicine.

Elementata

Elementata — Actual source form; related forms are discussed without manufacturing a lemma. II.140.1.

Elementa

Elementa — Actual source form; related forms are discussed without manufacturing a lemma. II.140.1.

vegetabilisch Wasser

vegetabilisch Wasser — Actual source form; related forms are discussed without manufacturing a lemma. I.012.1.