The Art of Medicine

is endowed with the power of vegetating. Its motion is more perfect, more distinct, and, as the Greeks interpret, poikiloteros more varied/intricate. Contained within vegetation are attraction, retention, G digestion, assimilation, and other motions of the vegetative faculty of that kind, which we call natural actions, about which Galenus Galen wrote most fully in the book De facultatibus naturalibus On Natural Faculties. By the same reasoning, the form of multiform things (which I said earlier were called heterogeneis dissimilar-parted by the Greeks, that is, those that are born not only from elements but from natures mixed from elements) is more distinct and perfect. And these very things, the better they are tempered and the more elaborately they are mixed by nature, the more composite, distinct, and perfect a form they possess; and consequently, they have more and more perfect motions. For plants precede the elements in perfection and number of actions; animals precede plants; and a human precedes all these, since he is the most tempered and most elaborate of all things generated in this world, and is like the most absolute and most perfect work of nature. The end is that for the sake of which something is done: as a muscle is for the sake of moving. The end, however, is the first of all causes and also the last. It is the first, indeed, because in all things that are done, we first consider this and conceive it in our mind. It is the last, because it happens last.