From the book
The Sophic Hydrolith, Water Stone of the Wise
Anonymous and companion authors · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordExpressions for producing one's like state a relation between a source and its offspring.
- In the Sophic HydrolithNature first distinguishes metals' mere being from the growth of plants and the sensation of animals.
- In this editionThe English “like” can mean resemblance, suitable kind, or the reproduced form.
- A place to readPlants/animals produce their like; metals explicitly do not.
Meaning
Expressions for producing one's like state a relation between a source and its offspring. They do not necessarily claim that every natural thing possesses the same reproductive capacity. The dialogue uses likeness both for familiar seed-bearing creatures and for a general analogy of contained potential. Its later restriction of the maxim is therefore essential. In the Way of Truth, adding “their like” belongs instead to the affinity of elemental fire and air.
Use in the book
Nature first distinguishes metals' mere being from the growth of plants and the sensation of animals. Plants preserve their form in seed; animals produce their like through seed. Metals, she says, have no life, nourishment for growth, or generative seed and therefore do not beget their like. This is not an incidental exception but part of her account of different natural grades.
The answering alchemist later rehearses the sufficiency of the one matter by analogy with a human being, horse, grain, or fruit. Human seed contains the prospective bodily form; fruit comes from fruit and an animal from an animal. The examples show why a principle of development need not be continually supplied from outside. They do not, on their own, establish that a finished metal can be planted like grain.
That limitation becomes explicit in the subsequent gold discussion. The speaker denies that one can say universally that every thing begets its like. The claim is valid for plants and sentient creatures but ill said of minerals, which in his account do not increase by cultivation. Even corrupting a determinate species does not guarantee regeneration of the same form. The passage makes the logical scope of the maxim its subject.
The Way of Truth employs likeness differently. Because air shares the nature of fire and elemental fire the nature of air, adding their like is said to produce conjunction. This is a claim about compatibility within that companion's elemental account, not evidence that the author accepts the dialogue's no-growth thesis about metals. The volume offers related language in genuinely different explanations.
Places to read
- Nature’s Demonstration to the Erring Alchemist · unit 2Plants/animals produce their like; metals explicitly do not.
- Nature’s Demonstration to the Erring Alchemist · unit 15Alchemist’s reproductive analogy supplies same-kind continuity.
- Nature’s Demonstration to the Erring Alchemist · unit 17Universal like-begets-like is rejected for minerals.
- Way of Truth · unit 16Adding like to like supports conjunction of the elemental natures.
Translation
The English “like” can mean resemblance, suitable kind, or the reproduced form. The German phrases are therefore indexed together for comparison rather than treated as a single technical noun. The translation preserves the decisive qualification “one cannot say universally” in Nature’s Demonstration to the Erring Alchemist · unit 17. Omitting that sentence would reverse the dialogue's position and make its examples support a universal rule which it expressly rejects.
Attested forms
jhr gleiches; jhres gleichen; vom Thier; Frucht von Frucht; jedes Ding seines gleichen; ihres gleichen