Treatise on the Great Art

Download or read book Treatise on the Great Art written by Antoine-Joseph Pernety and published by Rarebooksclub.com. This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Some of the ancients placed Fire as a fourth Element, in the highest region of the Air, because they regarded it as the lightest and most subtle. But the Fire of Nature does not differ from the Celestial Fire; this is why Moses makes no mention of it in Genesis, because he had said that Light was created on the first day. The fire which we use ordinarily is partly natural and partly artificial. The Creator has placed in the sun an igneous spirit, the principle of movement and of gentle heat, such as is necessary to Nature for 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 facultiesin moveme...