Water skimming a field

Meaning

Water rapidly skimming a field illustrates why contact without sufficient inward reception and retention fails to accomplish its purpose. Surface wetting is contrasted with effective inward reception.

II.2.12 argues that celestial powers must not merely pass over earth: they penetrate to the lowest centre, where no further descent is possible and they gather. The field comparison therefore supplies the need for a pause or retention, not an agricultural instruction. It also explains why subtlety alone is insufficient in the broader work. A power must enter, remain and be available for action, much as the proposed medicine must combine penetration with stability.

The English retains both the surface and the speed of the water, since together they establish the analogy's failure of retention. The claim about celestial accumulation remains the conclusion Nuysement draws from it.