Life, vegetation and the three kingdoms · Lexicon

From the book

The Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I

Attributed to Abraham the Jew · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordLife is identified through generation, nourishment, growth, and characteristic operations; the book extends these predicates to metals.
In the bookThe three kingdoms are differentiated recipients of related formative powers and of the stone’s claimed medicine.
TranslationVegetation means vegetative activity or growth, not simply a collection of plants. Metallic life remains an explicit historical claim.
A place to readRead scans 191–192 for the argument from operations and 297 for the stone’s need to act within all three kingdoms.

Meaning

The book’s definition of living activity is wider than a modern biological classification. Compounds nourish themselves, grow, increase, age, die, and regenerate through an incorruptible spirit. Metals are included because the writer attributes these operations to them. The lexicon reports this historical natural philosophy without translating its claims into a modern account of inert substances or pretending that the author already possessed a contemporary scientific concept of life.

The three kingdoms remain distinct even when their powers have a common source. Vegetable, animal, and mineral are not interchangeable labels. The stone must possess capacities appropriate to all three if it is to renew them. Shared origin makes cross-kingdom efficacy conceivable in the author’s system, but different forms and preparations specify how the power operates.

Use in the book

The Pan exposition at scan 119 presents a figure described as mineral, vegetable, and animal. Its pine crown, wooden staff, and goat form give visible signs of those aspects. The associated nymphs distinguish a rock-derived spirit, volatile mercurial water, and muddy sulfurous water produced in corruption. A common origin does not cancel the three waters’ differences. The figure offers a concentrated version of the book’s larger tendency to gather diverse natural powers within one subject.⁴⁹

Scan 191 supplies a general argument. Every compound is filled with a spirit through which it is nourished, lives, grows, and multiplies. Generation, nutrition, and germination belong to the soul’s mixing of elements into unity. Metals are then said to contain a volatile spirit because they visibly live and increase. The author treats the operations as evidence for life, not life as an unexplained label attached beforehand.

The next scan asks whether life and soul can be denied to things whose parts serve generation, nutrition, vegetation, and increase, and which grow young, age, die, and regenerate according to their own genius. The rhetorical question is strong, but the named capacities remain the substance of the argument. The author then turns to experience and differentiates the incorruptible spirit’s names in plants, animals, metals, and minerals. The common pattern is expressed through distinct local appellations and degrees of purification.

Scans 255–257 connect life with stronger union and purity. The quintessence’s spirit attracts and retains seminal forms; a more purified mixture supports a nobler and more vegetative life. Metals are said to hold abundant germinative power because their parts are homogeneous and incorruptible, although the fixed body can imprison that power in a dormant state. The artist must remove impediments. This reconciles, within the author’s account, the outward hardness of a metal with the claim that it can be awakened to generation.

Nutrition is described as generation extended and amplified. Formative seed power is concentrated in animal sperm and vegetable seeds, but other bodily parts are not therefore deprived of it. The example of transplanted parts helps the writer explain continued nourishment outside an original whole. The principle of life is distributed, while its successful activity depends on the state and arrangement of its recipient.

At scan 297 the stone must have vegetative, animal, and mineral soul so that it can act upon plants, animals, and minerals. Its claims are not confined to transmutation of metals. The same passage nevertheless adapts a glorious quality to the metallic subject by replacing agility with fusibility. The common life principle does not remove differences in operation. The closing scan 316 compresses the unity into one matter that is plant and stone, metal and mineral, body and soul, element and heaven, yet one. The many predicates are the result of the book’s argument and should not be reduced to a single modern category.⁵⁰

Places to read

Manuscript 46r · Scan 119Pan’s mineral, vegetable, and animal aspects and the differentiated waters of one origin.
Manuscript 81r · Scan 191Life and growth attributed to compounds and metals through spirit.
Manuscript 81v · Scan 192The argument from living operations and the differing names of spirit in the kingdoms.
Manuscript 110r · Scan 255Purity, union, and a nobler vegetative life.
Manuscript 110v · Scan 256Metallic germinative power and nutrition as extended generation.
Manuscript 131r · Scan 297The stone needs three corresponding souls to act on three kingdoms.
Manuscript 140 · Scan 316The final many predicates of one matter.

Translation

Life translates vie, while vegetation follows végétation in technical contexts. The latter concerns growth or vegetative activity and should not be mistaken for plants collectively. Vegetable is used as the historical kingdom adjective where the source makes that classification; plant is used for the ordinary noun.

The edition retains the author’s claims that metals live, age, and die. Recasting them as merely figurative without explanation would remove the inference he draws from their alleged operations. Equally, the lexicon presents the claims as his account rather than certifying metallic life under a modern scientific definition.

vie

Attested: H001-S192; H001-S255. Life inferred from operations and increased through purified union.

végétation

Attested: H001-S192. Vegetative growth among the functions of compounds.

minéral, végétal et animal

Attested: H001-S119. The threefold description of Pan within the common-source account.

Source note

Hogart Manuscript 3, scan 119. The figure’s three kingdoms and the three waters are related classifications, but the water names remain differentiated within the common origin.

Hogart Manuscript 3, scans 297–298 and 316. Cross-kingdom efficacy coexists with adaptations to a particular subject; the final unity does not erase the preceding distinctions of function.