Pernety - A Treatise On The Great Art.pdf - cyjack.com

The Great Art page 42her operations. It communicates it to all bodies, and by exciting and developing the Fire which isinnate in them, it preserves the principle of generation and of life. Each individual partakes of it moreor less. He who seeks in Nature another element of Fire, is ignorant of what the sun and light are.It is placed in the Moist Radical as its proper seat. With animals it seems to have established itschief domicile in the heart, which communicates it to all parts, as the sun does to all the Universe.The Fire of Nature is her first agent. It reduces the germs from potentiality to actuality. As soon as itno longer acts, all apparent movement and all vital action ceases. The principle of movement is light,and movement is the cause of heat. This is why the absence of the sun and of light has such a greateffect upon bodies. Heat penetrates to the interior of the most opaque and hardest substances, andanimates the hidden and torpid nature. Light penetrates only transparent bodies, and its property is tomanifest the perceptible accidents of the composites. Thus the sun is the first natural and universalagent.In departing from the sun light strikes the dense bodies, the celestial as well as the terrestrial; itplaces their faculties in movement, carries them with it, reflects them and diffuses them in the upperAir as well as in the lower. Air having a disposition to mix with the Water and the Earth, becomes thevehicle of these faculties, and communicates them to the bodies which are formed of them, or whichare by analogy most susceptible of them. These are the faculties which are called influences. Manynatural philosophers deny their existence, because they do not know them.One divides Fire into three kinds, the Celestial, the Terrestrial, or Simple, and the Artificial. Thefirst is the principle of the other two and is divided into Universal and Particular. The Universaldiffused everywhere, excites and puts in movement the forces of bodies; it warms and preserves thegerms of things infused into our globe, destined to serve as their makers. It develops the particularFire; it mixes the elements and gives form to matter.The particular Fire is innate, and implanted in each mixture with its germ. It acts little, except whenexcited; it then does, in the part of the Universe, what the sun, its father, does in the whole.Everywhere there is production, there must be Fire, as the efficient cause. The ancients thought aswe:Inde hominum pecudumque genus, vitœque volantum,Et quœ marmoreo fert monstra sub œquore pontus.Igneus est illis vigor, et cœlestis origoSemenibus. Virg. Æneid. l. 6.But it is surprising that they have admitted a contradiction between Fire and Water, since there is noWater without Fire and since they always act in concert in the generations of individuals.Every discerning eye must, on the contrary, remark a love, a sympathy which causes thepreservation of the Universe, the cube of Nature, and the strongest bond, to unite the Elements andthe superior with the inferior things. This love is, to speak thus, what we should call Nature, theMinister of the Creator, who employs the Elements to execute His will according to the laws whichHe has imposed upon them. Everything is done in the World in peace and unity, which cannot be aneffect of hatred and contradiction. Nature would not be so like to herself in the formation ofindividuals of the same species, if all was not done in concert. We would see only monsters proceedfrom the heterogeneous germs of fathers perpetually hostile, constantly at war with each other. Do wesee the animals work through hatred and contradiction for the propagation of their species? Let usjudge the other operations of Nature by this: her laws are simple and uniform.