, but also by
the Christian mystics and by the alchemists.

Artephius is quoted by H. A., p. 86, as follows: "... This water [water of
life] causes the dead body to vegetate, increase and spring forth, and to
rise from death to life by being dissolved first, and then sublimed. And
in doing this the body is converted into a spirit, and the spirit
afterwards into a body; and then is effected the amity, the peace, the
concord and the union of the contraries."

Similarly Ripley (H. A., p. 245): "This is the highest perfection to which
any sublunary body can be brought, by which we know that God is one, for
God is perfection; to which, whenever any creature arrives in its kind
[according to its nature], it rejoiceth in unity, in which there is no
division nor alterity, but peace and rest without contention."

The final character of the completed philosopher's stone makes it
conceivable, that, as the hermetic masters say, it is made only once by a
man and then not again. The Stone is an absolutely imperishable Good; but
if it should be lost it is surely not the right stone.

I have now to offer some conjectures regarding further interpretations of
the two and the three principles [Symbol: Gold] and [Symbol: Silver],
namely [Symbol: Sulfur] [Symbol: Mercury] [Symbol: Salt]. We are aware of
a general difference. I add now first the remark of Hitchcock that the
"two" things are to be regarded as an antithesis: _natura naturans_ and
_natura naturata_. We might intellectually conceive the [Symbol: Mercury]
(mercury) given by many writers at the beginning of the work as a double
one, on the one hand as nature and on the other as our world picture. We
cause it to work on our [Symbol: Sulphur] (sulphur), i.e., on our
affectivity by which the [Symbol: Sulphur] is purified and dissolved, for
it is compelled to adapt itself to the requirements of the world laws. But
by this means a new world picture is produced, for the former had been
influenced by the unclarified [Symbol: Sulphur]; our affective life limits
our intellectual. The new world picture or the newly gained [Symbol:
Mercury] we combine with our [Symbol: Sulfur] and so on, until finally
after a gradual clarification nature and our world picture harmonize. Then
there are no longer two mercuries but only one; and the sulphur, our
completed subject, has become more or less a unity. Now we may advance to
the unification of the two clarified things, which in this stage are
calle