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Operations, changes and qualities

Fusibility

fusibilité, fusibility; fusibilité mercurielle, mercurial fusibility

Fusibility is the capacity enabling the prepared matter to enter metals and communicate its perfection.

From the book

The Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I

Attributed to Abraham the Jew · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordFusibility is the capacity enabling the prepared matter to enter metals and communicate its perfection. It is connected with, but not identical to, subtlety and penetrability.
  • In this bookThe final account of the stone's qualities substitutes fusibility for the agility of glorified bodies. A metal is not granted the corresponding movement from place to place, so its effective relation to other metals requires a different quality.
  • Translation‘Fusibility’ preserves the technical noun and its repeated place in a coordinated list. It should not be reduced to ordinary melting, because the author himself says that several fusible metals cannot therefore penetrate one another.
  • A place to readRead manuscript 131r–132v, scans 297–300: fusibility, subtlety, permanence and tincture are tested as mutually necessary qualities.

Meaning

Fusibility supplies an operative capacity rather than the entire work. To act within a metal, the stone must pass through all its parts. Its mercurial fusibility is said to enable this passage, but only in company with further qualities that make the penetration effective and lasting.

The comparison with glorified bodies gives the term its special position. Subtlety, agility, incorruptibility and light have corresponding material qualities, yet the correspondence is not mechanically one-to-one. The author explicitly substitutes fusibility for agility rather than saying that the metal possesses the same local movement.

Use in the book

The argument at scan 297 begins with the stone's claimed power to renew plants, animals, the human body and nature. Its action upon metals requires subtlety and passage through their parts, dependent on mercurial fusibility. Fixity must accompany this entrance, or the tincture would escape into the air before introducing its form.

Scan 298 makes the dependence explicit. Fusibility without subtlety, subtlety without permanence, and permanence without tincture are dismissed as nothing for this purpose. Fusibility is present in several metals, yet they do not all penetrate one another. The quality is therefore necessary but insufficient: it permits a mode of action whose success depends on the subject's whole constitution.

The author calls the first fusibility nature's work, arising from its mingling of elements in mercury. An ingenious artist must then perfect the matter beyond what nature alone provides. The following side insists that a light, volatile body must become fixed and remain in fire long enough to act. This keeps fusibility joined to resistance rather than to unrestricted flight.

The next continuation returns to proportion. Cold earthiness obstructs fusion, while volatile humidity obstructs permanence in fire (132v; scan 300). A successful subject must reconcile conditions that seem opposed. Fusibility consequently belongs to the book's account of a perfected mixture: no single familiar property can stand in for the whole.

The phrase linking metal and denied local movement is awkward in the source. The present French reading refusé is retained, and the comparison should not be rewritten as though the manuscript securely said that the metal had been remelted.125

Places to read

  1. Manuscript 131r · Scan 297Mercurial fusibility and the substitution for glorified bodies' agility.
  2. Manuscript 131v · Scan 298The coordinated qualities and the insufficiency of ordinary fusibility.
  3. Manuscript 132r · Scan 299Permanence in fire gives penetration time to act.
  4. Manuscript 132v · Scan 300Cold earthiness obstructs fusion; volatile humidity obstructs permanence.

Translation

The translation keeps ‘fusibility’ in every occurrence within this argument, allowing its repetitions and questions to remain visible. ‘Penetrability’ and ‘subtlety’ remain separate words. ‘Brilliance or tincture’ preserves the source's paired fulgidité ou la teinture rather than making brightness the definition of fusibility.126

fusibilité

Attested: H001-S297; H001-S298. The recurring noun for the property required in metallic action.

fusibilité mercurielle

Attested: H001-S297. The qualified expression that links passage into metals with mercury.

Source note

See the reading register for H001-S297. Refusé is the retained reading; refondu is an unadopted conjecture that would materially change the clause.

Manuscript 131v, scan 298. The source coordinates fusibility, subtlety, penetrability, fixity and brilliance or tincture as qualities of the Arabian elixir.