Thomas Vaughan (1621–1666), a Welsh alchemist and writer, distinguishes the outward appearance of a body from what he believes participates in the making of new forms within it. His examples in Aula Lucis include earth, water, stones and human beings. None of them displays the principle he seeks plainly on its surface. He therefore uses a comparison to help readers understand what they are looking for in the first place.
All these things have a lumpish, ineffectual outside, but inwardly they are full of a subtil, vital limositie impregnated with fire, and this nature makes use of in generations, wherefore wee call it the sperm […].
– Thomas Vaughan, Aula Lucis, 1652, p. 12.[1]
Vaughan’s word is limositie. Here it refers to the muddy or slimy character of a subtle matter. His mention of fire joins two impressions the hand would find difficult to grasp at once. One suggests moisture and the ability to take a shape, the other warmth and activity. Vaughan expects their conjunction to help explain how something new can come into being. When he speaks of seed in the next sentence, he explicitly takes up that question of generation.
A human being supplies his clearest example of the distinction. The body can be seen and its outlines described. What gives rise to further life is nevertheless distinguishable from the body as a whole. By the same reasoning Vaughan distinguishes the visible fabric of the world from what he thinks makes formation possible within it. The emphasis falls on a change in the observer’s question. Weight and outline describe the outward form of a stone. Following Vaughan means asking a second question about the hidden material that, in this author’s view, participated in making it.
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Here all the little blades of grass and wood and stone and all things are one.
Meister Eckhart (um 1260–vor 1329)
Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften. In unsere Sprache übertragen von Gustav Landauer · p. 126
Our translation from Gustav Landauer’s German rendering
The great mother is the earth. The stones in the earth’s body, I think, are what is meant by her bones. These are what we are told to throw behind our backs.
Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–17/18 CE)
Metamorphoses · 1951 · p. 30–31
Our translation from the Latin
Perhaps this block of marble is only a heap of infinitely many living bodies, or like a lake full of fish, although the eye can ordinarily distinguish these animals only in bodies that have partly decayed.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)
Brief an Antoine Arnauld vom 30. April 1687 · 1846 · p. 96–97
Our translation
When you bend down towards all this activity, it is almost as if you could overhear the hidden history of how plants grow and the quiet beating of the mountain’s heart.
Very little. One makes marble out of flesh, and flesh out of marble.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
Œuvres complètes de Diderot, tome II. Philosophie · p. 105
Our translation
The fleeting sunbeam has been captured and enclosed in your mysterious core.
Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863)
Excerpt. Our translation from the German edition of 1904
I thank you, silent stone, and bend down towards you: I owe you my life as a plant.
The precious stones which are the foundations denote truths Divine shining through in the ultimate of order.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772)
Arcana Coelestia · 1938 · p. 318
Clause from the cited English edition. Initial capital supplied.
The finest artist has no conception that a single block of marble does not enclose within its excess. Only the hand that obeys the intellect can reach it.
And he the bard, a crystal soul Sphered and concentric with the whole.
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