Fludd lifts a glass vessel to the light as rainclouds gather outside.

How the stone returns to cloud

Robert Fludd (1574–1637), an English physician and natural philosopher, brings questions about the construction of the world into conversation with Scripture in his Mosaicall Philosophy. A heavy stone supplies a particularly striking example of condensation. Anyone lifting it feels its weight at once. The air around it can hardly be perceived in the same way. Fludd assigns them different places in a sequence and accompanies his reader on the return journey.

Reading a sequence backwards

So also the Stone is resolved into water, and water into a vaporous clowd, and the clowd into aire from whence it came […]

– Robert Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy, 1659, p. 78.[1]

Stone is resolved into water, water into a vaporous cloud and the cloud into air. Notice the change of experience within that single sentence. A hard object can lie quietly on a table. Water requires a vessel if it is to stay there. A cloud possesses an identifiable outline whose edges can alter from one moment to the next. At last there remains air, whose presence an observer still feels in breathing even when the eye can no longer draw a boundary around it.

Where dissolution comes to an end

For Fludd formation and dissolution belong together. The sequence can be understood only by following it in both directions. What previously emerged in an increasingly definite shape is to pass back into a simpler condition. Stone represents a moment of particular firmness in a much longer history. An everyday glance might stop at the contrast between a heavy specimen and fugitive vapour. Fludd's sentence asks us to pay as much attention to the passages between them as to the two conspicuous ends of the series.