Atalanta Fleeing

Among the Peripatetics Peripatetics: Followers of Aristotle’s school of philosophy, who often discussed logic and nature while walking through the Lyceum in Athens. and rightly judging Philosophers, it is established that the Nutrient is turned into the substance of the nourished, and is assimilated to it—not indeed before, but after its alteration—and this is held as a most true Axiom. For how would a nutrient, which was already similar and the same as the nourished beforehand, need a change of its essence? If that happened, it would not remain the same or similar. Or how could those things which cannot be assimilated to the nourished be taken as nourishment, such as wood, stones, and other things of that kind? Therefore, as the first scenario is useless, so the second is contrary to nature.

However, for a newborn human to be nourished by the milk of animals is not foreign to nature: because its assimilation can occur, though far more easily from the mother’s milk than from another's. Whence physicians conclude that it contributes to the health, the likeness of substance and character, and the strength of the infant, if it is always fostered and raised on its own mother’s milk; conversely, if on another's. This is the harmony of all nature: that like rejoices in its like, and follows in its footsteps as much as possible in all things, by a certain silent consensus and conspiracy.

The same occurs in the natural work of the Philosophers original: "naturali Philosophorum opere." This refers to the "Great Work" of alchemy: the creation of the Philosopher's Stone., which is just as much ruled by nature in its formation as an infant in the mother’s womb. And although a father and mother, and the nurse herself, are attributed to it by way of likeness, it is nonetheless no more artificial than the generation of any animal. Two seeds are joined by a certain delightful artifice by animals and by both sexes of man, from which, once united through successive alteration, an Embryo is made, which grows and increases, acquires life and motion, and is then nourished by milk.

Truly, at the time of conception and pregnancy, it is necessary for a woman to conduct herself temperately in heat, food and drink, motion and rest, and other things; otherwise, a miscarriage will follow and the destruction of the conceived fetus. This observation of the six non-natural things 6 non-naturals: In Galenic medicine, these are external factors—air, food/drink, sleep/wake, motion/rest, excretion/retention, and passions—that must be balanced to maintain health., because it is prescribed by physicians according to their art, is also artificial. In the same way, if the seeds are not joined in the Philosophical work, they must be joined. But if they were found joined somewhere—as the seed of the rooster and the substance of the hen are held together in one container in an egg—then the work of the Philosophers would be even more natural than the generation of animals. But let us grant, as the philosophers test[ify]—