Limits of modern substance identification

Meaning

Spirit, essence, salt, mercury, sulphur and earth operate across several explanatory levels: a universal principle, a power or quality, a specified body, or a prepared subject. The supplied annotations accordingly decline to replace them wholesale with modern chemical names. A comparison with an ordinary substance is not always an identification, and a local identification does not automatically govern every other passage.

The shining sparks and little crystals associated with renewed terrestrial impregnation are descriptions, not a sufficient chemical analysis. Salt is not standardised to sodium chloride, nor are bone and shell reclassified as ordinary glass merely because the author explains their hardness through vitrification. The same restraint applies to the bodily examples: Polipodes is retained as “polypodies”, separately from the following little creatures and vermin, without claiming an exact modern species.

These limits belong to present editorial interpretation. They must not be recast as if Nuysement himself denied modern formulae unknown to his argument. The positive task is to identify what a substance-name does in a passage, which agent acts, what receives the action, and which qualifications restrict the claim.