48 PARACELSUS 



to its new surroundings. "Two factors are discernible 

 in each thing — its body (form) and its Activity (qualities). 

 The latter is nothing else but an effluence of the Supreme 

 Cause because everything exists from the beginning in 

 God, into whose unmanifested state all things will return 

 in the end, and from whose power they all receive their 

 qualities, or whatever they deserve on account of their 

 capacity to receive or attract it. 



Life is an universal omnipresent principle, and nothing 

 is without life. " It cannot be denied that the air gives 

 life to all corporeal things, such as grow from the earth 

 and are born of it ; but the special life of each thing is a 

 spiritual being, an invisible and intangible spirit. There 

 is nothing corporeal which has not within itself a spiri- 

 tual essence, and there is nothing which does not contain 

 a life hidden within. Life is something spiritual. Life is 

 not only in that which moves, such as men and animals, 

 but in all things ; for what would be a corporeal form 

 without a spirit ? The form may be destroyed ; but 

 the spirit remains and is living, for it is the subjec- 

 tive life. There are as many spirits and lives as there 

 are bodily forms. Therefore there are celestial, infernal, 

 and terrestrial spirits, spirits of human beings, of metals, 

 stones, plants, &c. The spirit is the life and the balsam 

 within all corporeal things" {Vita Rerum, iv.). In 

 some forms life acts slowly — for instance, in stones; in 

 hers (organised beings) it acts quickly. Each element 

 has its own peculiar living existences, belonging to it 

 exclusively.'^ Such existences or beings, living in the 

 invisible elements, are the elemental spirits of Nature. 

 They are beings of the Mysteria specialia, soul-forms, 

 which will return into their chaos, and who are not 

 capable of manifesting any higher spiritual activity because 

 they do not possess the necessary kind of constitution in 

 which an activity of a spiritual character can manifest 



^ For instance, fishes in the water, blood-corpuscles in the blood, 

 apimalculae in putrid fluids, bacteria in impure air, &c. &c, 



