VIII

A 5

his Treatise on Sulfur, in the discourse on the three Principles of all things: And there is nothing but this unique matter in the world, through which, and from which the Philosophers' Stone is prepared. And in this, all the Philosophers, both Ancient and modern, further agree. Since therefore this matter is unique, no one but a fool could conclude otherwise than that so many names of metals, minerals, and stones, and so forth, imposed upon it are fictitious and illusory. As Isaac Hollandus a 15th-century Dutch alchemist repeats in his Mineral Work, Book 1, chapter 14: That our Stone cannot be extracted from metals and hard bodies.

Yet the wise in unison add that this subject is a certain universal chaos of celestial origin, existing in its first nature. But in its belly, it contains a certain mineral salt of a metallic nature, to be sure. Yet it is in no way specified in the vegetable kingdom, nor in the animal kingdom, nor in the mineral, as is clearly evident among others from the words of Sendivogius in Letter 54, where one reads: All the Philosophers testify that their Thing is neither vegetable nor mineral, nor animal, nor directly proceeding from them, and so forth. Although metaphorically, for a reason known only to us, as Paracelsus says in his Collections of Chemistry chapter 7, it is called animal and vegetable; and not without merit, as those who know the matter will testify with me. Indeed, it was not without cause that Lullius, Roger Bacon, Saint Thomas Thomas Aquinas, though the alchemical works attributed to him are pseudepigraphal, Parifinus, and others wrote that from vegetables and animals