From the book
The Summary of Physics Restored
Attributed to Jean d’Espagnet · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordNutrition repairs a living compound; respiration is the repeated drawing of outside air. The book combines bodily food with a proposed spiritual nourishment.
- In the bookFood restores bodily parts and humours, while respiration contributes ethereal spirits to the renewal of radical moisture and vital spirits. Generation and nutrition share a pattern without becoming identical events.
- In this edition“Bellows” in canon 191 is the author's image for lungs. The translation preserves the historical account rather than replacing its ethereal influx with a modern explanation.
- A place to readCanons 185 and 189–191 give the compact account; canon 212 follows nourishment through humours and spirits into bodily tissue.
Meaning
Alimentum and pabulum both name nourishment or food, but their objects and scale determine the sense. A plant's bodily food, a fire's fuel, the proposed spiritual food of animals, and the Intelligences' immortal nourishment are not automatically the same material. Nutritio concerns the maintenance and restoration of an already existing living compound. The comparison with generation turns on shared instruments, moist preparation, and the contribution of spirits rather than on a claim that eating produces a new individual each time.
Use in the book
The preparatory account of moisture already links nutrition with generation. Canon 133 makes the moist element circulate in both processes, through the instruments of rarefaction and condensation and through spirits as intermediaries. Canon 141 describes the earth's reception and digestion of moisture as nourishment, and 145 compares drying, moistening, and digesting with food, drink, and sleep. These analogies establish a common pattern across the world and its smaller living compounds without making their bodily arrangements identical.
Canon 185 states the comparison especially carefully: generation and nutrition have “almost the same” rationale. Elements and foods must undergo putrefaction and resolution into moist matter, “as though” into first matter. The resulting chaos contains the conditions required for a new formation or for repair. The language is analogical at two levels: the processes resemble one another, and each small world's generation and restoration resembles the greater world's creation and preservation. The qualifiers prevent the ordinary process from being equated without remainder with primordial creation.
In canon 188 living things are inverted trees whose roots reach Heaven; this prepares the double nourishment of 189–190. The former gives a chain of restoration. Spirits are continually lost through pores, food supplies nourishing juice, bodily parts and humours are replenished, and the purer humours—especially blood—participate in renewing radical moisture when ethereal influx joins them through breathing. This is a historical explanatory sequence. It does not identify radical moisture as a modern bodily fluid or establish a present nutritional treatment.
Canon 190 argues that bodily nourishment contributes little without spiritual nourishment. Plants owe growth to air and Heaven as well as earth; earth herself is pictured drinking ethereal milk. The author supports this with the blessing of Joseph, whose sun, moon, dew, deep, mountains, and hills he interprets as witnesses to celestial fertility. The historical marginal citation names Deuteronomy 33. The modern note identifies the paraphrased verses more narrowly; that additional identification is commentary, not an extra ancient marginal reference.
Canon 191 turns from plants to animal breathing. Against a view attributed to physicians, the lungs are not only bellows for cooling the heart. Their repeated movement also supplies the heart with ethereal spirits, renewing and multiplying vital spirits. “Not only” matters: the author supplements the cooling function rather than simply denying it. Canon 212 later completes the material circuit. The better part of food and drink becomes humours and then spirits, which enter pores and adhere to flesh, sinews, bones, and other parts; the process restores losses through continual replacement. In the book's terms, spirit and body can therefore name phases or conditions within nutrition, not two absolutely sealed compartments.
Places to read
- Canon 133; 1653, pp. 97, 98LatinGeneration and nutrition share instruments and spiritual intermediaries.
- Canon 141; 1653, p. 103LatinEarth's digestion as nourishment in the wider circulation.
- Canon 145; 1653, p. 105LatinFood, drink, and sleep as analogues of natural operations.
- Canon 185; 1653, pp. 132, 133Latin“Almost the same” pattern, and resolution “as though” into first matter.
- Canon 188; 1653, pp. 134, 135LatinThe inverted tree draws nourishment from Heaven.
- Canon 189; 1653, pp. 135, 136LatinFood, humours, blood, breathing, and renewal of radical moisture.
- Historical margin — Canon 190 · Original marginal note 1; 1653, p. 136LatinThe historical margin identifies twofold bodily and spiritual nourishment.
- Historical margin — Canon 190 · Original marginal note 2; 1653, p. 136LatinThe historical marginal citation names Deuteronomy, chapter 33.
- Canon 190; 1653, p. 136LatinBodily and spiritual nourishment; the Joseph blessing.
- Canon 191; 1653, p. 137LatinThe lungs' cooling role is supplemented by ethereal reception.
- Canon 201; 1653, pp. 145, 146LatinFood as the condition of a flame’s continued communication, a different local use of nourishment vocabulary.
- Canon 212; 1653, pp. 154, 155LatinNutriment passes through humours and spirits into bodily parts.
- Canon 240; 1653, pp. 173, 174LatinThe Intelligences’ immortal nourishment illustrates the term’s different objects and scales.
Translation in this edition
The English “nourishing juice” follows succus nutriens, while “the more succulent substance” follows succulentiori and substantia in the food description: the comparative selects a portion of food. In 212 melior saltem eorum pars means “at least their better portion”; not everything eaten is said to complete the same beneficial transformation. Respiratio and aëris externi attractio are locally paired as breathing and drawing in outside air. The historical marginal notice at 190 reads DVPLEX ALIMENTVM, CORPOREVM ET SPIRITVALE; the twofold distinction belongs to the original argument, while annotation 109 explains its historical physiological setting.
Foods — alimenta
Foods, placed beside elements in the comparison between nutrition and generation. — Canon 185; 1653, pp. 132, 133.
Almost the same pattern — eadem ferè ratio
Almost the same pattern: a qualified analogy rather than identity. — Canon 185; 1653, pp. 132, 133.
Repair — reparatio
Restoration or repair, the ongoing counterpart to generation in the microcosm. — Canon 185; 1653, pp. 132, 133.
Appropriate food — cibo suo
Their own food: nourishment appropriate to the living beings in question. — Canon 189; 1653, pp. 135, 136.
Pores — poros
Pores through which natural spirits are said continually to escape. — Canon 189; 1653, pp. 135, 136.
Humours — humorum
Humours, bodily fluids within the historical physiological account. — Canon 189; 1653, pp. 135, 136.
Blood — sanguinis
Blood, especially implicated in the renewal of radical moisture. — Canon 189; 1653, pp. 135, 136.
Spiritual food — pabulum spirituale
Spiritual food supplied to plant roots and converted into bodily substance. — Canon 212; 1653, pp. 154, 155.
Lungs as bellows — folles
Bellows, the image of lungs supplying air near the heart. — Canon 191; 1653, p. 137.
Cooling — refrigerium
Cooling, a function the author retains but refuses to make exclusive. — Canon 191; 1653, p. 137.
Replacement — surrogationis
Replacement, the continuous repair of declining bodily substance. — Canon 212; 1653, pp. 154, 155.