Introduction to the Divine Art of Chemistry

to regulate and digest by means of mineral natural heat according to the natural philosophers, so that at the end of the digestion some metal is necessarily generated from it, and ultimately gold. It seems necessary, therefore, that this same agent should be joined to quicksilver in the art, so that it may digest, direct, and inform that quicksilver, so that at the end of the digestion and completion, it generates the exact same gold, just as nature does from it. It is therefore necessary that the same quicksilver and the same sulfur that is subjected to the operation of nature should also be entirely subjected to the operation of the art, and not something else, however similar it may appear in genus and appearance. For unless these were subject to our actions, this art would be entirely impossible. Nevertheless, the method of acting, digesting, and informing in the art is different from the natural one, and similarly the instrument or place and time, but they are equivalent toward the same ultimate end. Because, just as nature generates gold from that matter, so the art generates the form of gold, by eliciting it from that matter, with which form every metal, since it is matter to it, is converted by melting into the purest compound, namely gold. For every form, when it comes to its prepared matter, necessarily informs it, since the actions of active things exist only in a prepared patient. Those, therefore, who labor in foreign minerals without the intention of nature, and in vegetables and their parts, and animals and their parts, and superfluities, labor in vain. They alter them with vain and foreign alterations that do not dispose them toward the form. Therefore, they do not transform, since in such matters and agents there is no relationship, nor proportion, nor disposition through a being that informs imperfect metals with the form of gold, unless perhaps they are reduced to the primary matter, that is, the proximate one, which is that which has been named. To say, therefore, that there are many matters that can...