The Great Art

The Great Art page 42
her operations. It communicates it to all bodies, and by exciting and developing the Fire which is
innate in them, it preserves the principle of generation and of life. Each individual partakes of it more
or 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 its
chief 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 it
no 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 great
effect upon bodies. Heat penetrates to the interior of the most opaque and hardest substances, and
animates the hidden and torpid nature. Light penetrates only transparent bodies, and its property is to
manifest the perceptible accidents of the composites. Thus the sun is the first natural and universal
agent.
In departing from the sun light strikes the dense bodies, the celestial as well as the terrestrial; it
places their faculties in movement, carries them with it, reflects them and diffuses them in the upper
Air as well as in the lower. Air having a disposition to mix with the Water and the Earth, becomes the
vehicle of these faculties, and communicates them to the bodies which are formed of them, or which
are by analogy most susceptible of them. These are the faculties which are called influences. Many
natural 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. The
first is the principle of the other two and is divided into Universal and Particular. The Universal
diffused everywhere, excites and puts in movement the forces of bodies; it warms and preserves the
germs of things infused into our globe, destined to serve as their makers. It develops the particular
Fire; 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 when
excited; 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 as
we:
Inde hominum pecudumque genus, vitœque volantum,
Et quœ marmoreo fert monstra sub œquore pontus.
Igneus est illis vigor, et cœlestis origo
Semenibus. Virg. Æneid. l. 6.
But it is surprising that they have admitted a contradiction between Fire and Water, since there is no
Water 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 the
preservation of the Universe, the cube of Nature, and the strongest bond, to unite the Elements and
the superior with the inferior things. This love is, to speak thus, what we should call Nature, the
Minister of the Creator, who employs the Elements to execute His will according to the laws which
He has imposed upon them. Everything is done in the World in peace and unity, which cannot be an
effect of hatred and contradiction. Nature would not be so like to herself in the formation of
individuals of the same species, if all was not done in concert. We would see only monsters proceed
from the heterogeneous germs of fathers perpetually hostile, constantly at war with each other. Do we
see the animals work through hatred and contradiction for the propagation of their species? Let us
judge the other operations of Nature by this: her laws are simple and uniform.
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