."

The metallic subject must be gently dissolved in its own natural water
(conscience), not with powerful media, not with corroding acids, which the
foolish employ in order to reach the goal in a hurry, for by such means he
either spoils the materia or produces a merely superficial action.
Senseless asceticism and the like are just as objectionable as the
impetuous enthusiasm (which we called straw fire here). The ethical work
of alchemy as of common life is a sublimation; it is important that the
materia takes up at any time only as much as it can sublimate. We may also
conceive it in this way. The materia is to be moistened only with the
water that it can utilize after the solution has taken place (i.e., keep
in enduring form, absorb into their nature). Compare in this connection
the words of Count Bernhard von Trevis: "I tell you assuredly that no
water dissolves any metallic spices by a natural solution, save that which
abides with them in matter and form, and which the metals themselves,
being dissolved, can recongeal." (H. A., pp. 189 ff.)

The passage "slowly and quite judiciously" of the Smaragdine tablet will
now be fully appreciated.

The desired completion or oneness should be a state of the soul, a
condition of being, not of knowing. The means that lead to it presuppose
in the neophyte something analogous to religious faith, and because the
conditions of the mastery appear to the neophyte to contradict nature or
each other, the mystical experiences that are derived from it are called
"supernatural." The "supernatural" is, however, only an appearance, which
results when we conceive nature too narrowly, as when we see in her merely
the totality of bodies. If we mean by nature the possibility of life and
activity, then that which appears supernatural must be counted as nature.
The expressions natural and supernatural are but means of the thinking
judgment, they are preliminaries which have a certain justification but
only so long as they are an expression for a stage of knowledge. The
initially supernatural resolves itself in nature, or better, Nature is
raised to divinity. If the natural and the supernatural are symbolized,
the one being described as sulphur and the other as mercury, then the
disciples of philosophy, under the obligation to think things and not
merely names, are finally brought, during the process of search, to a
recognition of the inseparableness of both in a third something which may
be c