A key to physic, and the occult sciences

acting according to certain laws He Himself has established. This corresponds closely with the opinion of a sect of ancient philosophers who made Nature the god of the universe, The All original Greek: To Παν, whom they believed presided over and governed all things. However, they acknowledged this to be only an imaginary being, and that "nature" meant nothing more than the qualities or virtues that God implanted in His creatures, which their poets and orators had figuratively personified as a god. Consequently, Father Malebranche Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), a French Oratorian priest and rationalist philosopher. was provoked to say,

"that the 'nature' so often discussed in the academic schools is only fit to lead us back to pagan idolatry; since it teaches us to understand something which, without being God, acts continually throughout the universe,"

according to which, he supposes nature would be adored as an idol—conceived to possess an actual principle which, in cooperation with God, was the next and immediate cause of all the changes that happen to matter.

Aristotle, with the goal of concentrating these ideas of nature into a single point best suited to the works of an infinitely perfect and all-powerful Being, defines nature as: the principle and cause of motion and of that in which it is fundamentally in itself, and not by accident original Latin: "principium et causa motus et ejus in quo est primo per se, et non per accidens". This definition being misunderstood by the Peripatetics Followers of Aristotle’s philosophy. and the Stoics, they concluded that the principle of nature was a certain spirit or virtue diffused throughout the universe. They believed this spirit gave everything its motion by the invariable order of an inevitable necessity, without any freedom or knowledge. This led to the idea of a plastic nature In this context, "plastic" means "formative" or "shaping"—a force that molds matter into living forms., which several learned modern writers have described as a non-physical created substance. They argued it was endowed with a "vegetative life" (capable of growth) but not with sensation or thought. This substance was thought to penetrate the entire created universe, extending alongside it, and, under God’s direction, moving matter to produce phenomena that cannot be explained by the laws of mechanics. It was seen as active toward ends unknown to itself, not being conscious of its own actions, and yet having an obscure idea of the action it was about to perform.

In support of this plastic nature, Dr. Cudworth Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), a leading figure among the Cambridge Platonists. argues as follows:

"Since things are not produced by pure chance, nor by the unguided mechanism of matter, and since it is unreasonable to think that God Himself does everything immediately and miraculously, it may well be concluded that there is a plastic or formative nature under Him. As an inferior and subordinate instrument, it executes that part of His providence which consists in the regular motion of matter. Yet, beyond this, a higher providence must be acknowledged which, presiding over it, often supplies its defects and sometimes overrules it, because this plastic nature cannot act by choice or with its own discretion."

This doctrine, he believes, had the support original: "suffrage" of the best philosophers of all ages: Aristotle, Plato, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Hippocrates, Zeno, and the Stoics, as well as the later Platonists and Peripatetics, the chemists, the followers of Paracelsus Paracelsians: doctors and alchemists following the theories of Paracelsus, who emphasized chemicals and minerals in medicine., and several modern writers.