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

The Great Art page 43Let philosophy cease to attribute the alteration, the corruption, the decay of the Mixts to a pretendedantagonism of the elements; it is found in the penury and weakness peculiar to the First Matter; for inchaos Frigida non pugnabant calidis, humentia siccis. All was cold and humid, qualities whichbelong to Matter, considered as feminine. The warm and the dry, masculine and formal qualities,have come to it from Light, from which it has received its forms. Thus it is only after the retreat ofthe Waters that the Earth was called arid or dry.We see continually that heat and dryness give form to everything. A potter would never succeed inmaking a vase, if dryness does not give to the clay a certain degree of adhesion and solidity. If theearth is too moist, too soft, it is a mud, which has no determined form.Such was chaos, before the heat, or Light, had rarefied it, and caused the evaporation of a part of itsmoisture. The parts drew closer together, the clay of chaos became earth, and an earth of aconsistency fit to serve as the material in the formation of all the composites in Nature.Thus heat and dryness are only accidental qualities of the First Matter. It has been endowed withthem on receiving form, (Genesis, Chap. I). Thus it is not said in Genesis that God found chaos verygood, as He did Light and other things. The abyss seems to have acquired a degree of perfection, onlywhen it began to produce. Confusion, lack of form, and opaque density, a coldness, a crude moisture,and powerlessness, were its characteristics; qualities which indicate an ill body, inclined tocorruption. It has preserved something of this original fault, and has infected with it all the bodieswhich have proceeded from it, to be placed in this lower region. This is why all the composites have atransient manner of being, in regard to the determination of their individual and specific form.Howsoever opposed light and shadow may seem to be, since they have concurred, the one as agent,the other as patient, in the formation of the Universe, they have made by this agreement of theircontrary qualities, an almost unalterable treaty of peace, which has passed into their homogeneousfamily of the Elements, whence has resulted the peaceful generation of all individuals. Nature ispleased in combination and does all by proportion, weight and measure, and not by contradiction.Est modus in rebus sunt certi denique fines,Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum.- Hor. Art. Poët.Each element has, peculiar to itself, one of the qualities of which we speak. Warmth, dryness, coldand moisture are the four wheels which Nature employs to produce the slow, graduated and circularmovement which she seems to affect in the formation of all her works.Fire, her universal agent, is the principle of elementary fire. The latter is nourished by all fatmatters, because all that which is fat is of a humid and aerial nature. Although, externally, it mayappear dry to us, as sulphur, gunpowder, etc., experience teaches us that this exterior conceals a fat,oily moisture, which is resolved by the action of heat.Those who have imagined that it was formed in the air principle of hard bodies such as aerolites,have been mistaken, if they have regarded them as terrestrial bodies. It is a substance which belongsto the gross element of Water: a fat, viscous humour, enclosed in the clouds as in a furnace, where itcondensed and mixed with the sulphurous exhalations, which are warm and very inflammable. Theair, which is too much compressed by this condensation, is rarefied by heat, and produces the sameeffect as gunpowder in a bomb: the vessel breaks, the fire diffused in the air, freed from its bonds bythis movement, produces that light and noise, which often startle the most intrepid.Our artificial and common fire has properties exactly contrary to the Fire of Nature, althoughderived from it. It is the enemy of all production; it is maintained only by the ruin of bodies; it is