(108) I. First, there is the Power, from which a Body comes to be, whether Wood, Stone, or Herbs. II. After that, there is a Sap in that Thing, which is the Heart of the Thing. III. And thirdly, there is in it a springing, flowing Power, Smell or Taste, which is the Spirit of the Thing, whereby it grows and increases. Now if any of these Three fail, the Thing cannot subsist.

(126) Just as an Apple on a Tree cannot bring its Smell and Taste back again into the Tree, or into the Earth, though it be indeed the Son of the Tree; so it is also in Nature.

(95) For as it is generated out of all Powers, and has the Fountain of all Powers, so with its shining Lustre also, it brings the Fountain of all Powers into each Power, from whence then exits the Taste and Smell, also Seeing, Feeling, and Hearing; as also Reason and Understanding.

(101) then thou seest, that the Body upon the Root is dead also; for when the Virtue is gone out of the Root, then the Body is but a dead Carcase, and can operate or effect nothing at all. And that is, because the astringent and bitter Spirits have killed or destroyed the Body of the Water, and attracted the Fatness or Unctuosity thereof to themselves; and thus they have drawn or sucked up the Spirit thereof into the dead Body. [Bred or hatched up their Spirit in the dead Body.]

(68) Now, where nothing is, there nothing can come to be: All Things must have a Root, else can nothing grow: If the seven Spirits of Nature had not been from Eternity, then there would no Angel, no Heaven, also no Earth have come to be.

(92) But then when the Body begins to be too straight or narrow for it, that it can extend or stretch it no more, and that the Contention is too great, then the Bitter must yield itself captive. Yet, notwithstanding the Astringent cannot kill the Bitter, but only holds it captive, and so the Strife in them is so great, that the Bitter breaks out of the Body in Strings like Threads, and takes some of the Sun’s Sap or Body along with it. And this now is the Vegetation or Growing, and Incorporating or Imbodying of a Root in the Earth. [Fibræ. And this now is the Vegetation or Growing, and Incorporating or Imbodying of a Root in the Earth.] Now thou askest, How can God be in that Birth or Geniture? Answer.

(55) Then you taste the bitter Quality, which makes the Tree moveable or stirring, so that it springs and grows green and flourishes, and so gets its Branches, Leaves, and Fruit.

(22) For thus stood the Birth or Geniture of Nature in the Time of the Kindling, and was thus together incorporated in the Earth, and must also in such a Birth spring up again: For it is written; 'That the dead Earth should let the Grass and Herbs, and Trees spring up, each according to its Kind,' that is, according to the Kind and Quality, as it had been from Eternity, and as it had been in the heavenly Quality, Kind and Form. For that is called its own Kind, which is received in the Mother's Body or Womb, and is its own by Right of Nature, as its own peculiar Life. [Gen. 1. 12.]

(55) And there it is to be proved, whether it be a good Smell, or Savour pleasing to its Constitution and Complexion, or no: If it be good, then it brings the same to its Mother, that it may be brought to Effect; if not, then is it expelled and thrust away.

(100) thou must see, that all this is really so. For Example, take a Root which is of a hot Quality, put it in warm Water; or take it into thy Mouth, and make it warm and supple or moist; and then thou wilt soon perceive its Life, and active or operative Quality: But so long as it is without, or absent from the Heat, it is captivated in Death, and is cold as any other Root or Piece of Wood is. And

(17) For there, out of the Earth, sprung up Grass and Herbs, and Trees, and there now also it stands written thus: Each according to its Kind. In these Words lie the Kernel of the eternal Birth or Geniture hidden or concealed, and cannot be comprehended or apprehended by or with Flesh and Blood, but the Holy Ghost through the animated or soulish Birth must kindle the astral Man, otherwise he is blind herein, and understands nothing but concerning Earth and Stones, also Grass, Herbs, and wooden Trees. [Gen. 1. 12.]

(3) Of all these genera, those [species] which are animal have [many] roots, which stretch from the above below, whereas those which are stationary —these from [one] living root send forth a wood of branching greenery up from below into the upper parts. Moreover, some of them are nourished with a two-fold form of food, while others with a single form. Twain are the forms of food—for soul and body, of which [all] animals consist. Their soul is nourished by the ever-restless motion of the World ; their bodies have their growth from foods [drawn] from the water and the earth of the inferior world. Spirit, with which they all are filled, being interblended with the rest, doth make them live; sense being added, and also reason in the case of man—which hath been given to man alone as a fifth part out of the æther. Of all the living things [God] doth adorn, extend, exalt, the sense of man alone unto the understanding of the Reason of Divinity. But since I am impressed to speak concerning Sense, I will a little further on set forth for you the sermon on this [point]; for that it is most holy, and [most] mighty, not less than in the Reason of Divinity itself. VII

(92) And then from all the Qualities which are in the Body, there grows a Bud or Head, and there is a new Body in the Bud or Head, and is formed or figured answerable or like to the first Root in the Earth, only now it gets another more subtle Form.

(22) And as regards vegetal forms? Are we to imagine beneath the leading principle some sort of corporeal echo of it, something that would be tendency or desire in us and is growth in them? Or are we to think that, while the earth contains the principle of desire by virtue of containing soul, the vegetal realm possesses only this latter reflection of desire?

The first point to be decided is what soul is present in the earth.

Is it one coming from the sphere of the All, a radiation upon earth from that which Plato seems to represent as the only thing possessing soul primarily? Or are we to go by that other passage where he describes earth as the first and oldest of all the gods within the scope of the heavens, and assigns to it, as to the other stars, a soul peculiar to itself?

It is difficult to see how earth could be a god if it did not possess a soul thus distinct: but the whole matter is obscure since Plato's statements increase or at least do not lessen the perplexity. It is best to begin by facing the question as a matter of reasoned investigation.

That earth possesses the vegetal soul may be taken as certain from the vegetation upon it. But we see also that it produces animals; why then should we not argue that it is itself animated? And, animated, no small part of the All, must it not be plausible to assert that it possesses an Intellectual-Principle by which it holds its rank as a god? If this is true of every one of the stars, why should it not be so of the earth, a living part of the living All? We cannot think of it as sustained from without by an alien soul and incapable of containing one appropriate to itself.

Why should those fiery globes be receptive of soul, and the earthly globe not? The stars are equally corporeal, and they lack the flesh, blood, muscle, and pliant material of earth, which, besides, is of more varied content and includes every form of body. If the earth's immobility is urged in objection, the answer is that this refers only to spatial movement.

But how can perception and sensation be supposed to occur in the earth?

How do they occur in the stars? Feeling does not belong to fleshy matter: soul to have perception does not require body; body, on the contrary, requires soul to maintain its being and its efficiency, judgement belongs to the soul which overlooks the body, and, from what is experienced there, forms its decisions.

But, we will be asked to say what are the experiences, within the earth, upon which the earth-soul is thus to form its decisions: certainly vegetal forms, in so far as they belong to earth have no sensation or perception: in what then, and through what, does such sensation take place, for sensation without organs is too rash a notion. Besides, what would this sense-perception profit the soul? It could not be necessary to knowledge: surely the consciousness of wisdom suffices to beings which have nothing to gain from sensation?

This argument is not to be accepted: it ignores the consideration that, apart from all question of practical utility, objects of sense provide occasion for a knowing which brings pleasure: thus we ourselves take delight in looking upon sun, stars, sky, landscape, for their own sake. But we will deal with this point later: for the present we ask whether the earth has perceptions and sensations, and if so through what vital members these would take place and by what method: this requires us to examine certain difficulties, and above all to decide whether earth could have sensation without organs, and whether this would be directed to some necessary purpose even when incidentally it might bring other results as well.

(2) all the Creatures are made and descended from these Qualities, and live therein, as in their Mother; and the Earth and Stones descend or proceed from thence also; and all that grows out of the Earth, lives and springs forth out of the Virtue of these Qualities, no rational Man can deny it.

(2) To resume: there is from the first principle to ultimate an outgoing in which unfailingly each principle retains its own seat while its offshoot takes another rank, a lower, though on the other hand every being is in identity with its prior as long as it holds that contact.

In the case of soul entering some vegetal form, what is there is one phase, the more rebellious and less intellectual, outgone to that extreme; in a soul entering an animal, the faculty of sensation has been dominant and brought it there; in soul entering man, the movement outward has either been wholly of its reasoning part or has come from the Intellectual-Principle in the sense that the soul, possessing that principle as immanent to its being, has an inborn desire of intellectual activity and of movement in general.

But, looking more minutely into the matter, when shoots or topmost boughs are lopped from some growing thing, where goes the soul that was present in them? Simply, whence it came: soul never knew spatial separation and therefore is always within the source. If you cut the root to pieces, or burn it, where is the life that was present there? In the soul, which never went outside of itself.

No doubt, despite this permanence, the soul must have been in something if it reascends; and if it does not, it is still somewhere; it is in some other vegetal soul: but all this means merely that it is not crushed into some one spot; if a Soul-power reascends, it is within the Soul-power preceding it; that in turn can be only in the soul-power prior again, the phase reaching upwards to the Intellectual-Principle. Of course nothing here must be understood spatially: Soul never was in space; and the Divine Intellect, again, is distinguished from soul as being still more free.

Soul thus is nowhere but in the Principle which has that characteristic existence at once nowhere and everywhere.

If the soul on its upward path has halted midway before wholly achieving the supreme heights, it has a mid-rank life and has centred itself upon the mid-phase of its being. All in that mid-region is Intellectual-Principle not wholly itself- nothing else because deriving thence , yet not that because the Intellectual-Principle in giving it forth is not merged into it.

There exists, thus, a life, as it were, of huge extension, a total in which each several part differs from its next, all making a self-continuous whole under a law of discrimination by which the various forms of things arise with no effacement of any prior in its secondary.

But does this Soul-phase in the vegetal order, produce nothing?

It engenders precisely the Kind in which it is thus present: how, is a question to be handled from another starting-point.

(58) And though indeed the bestial Body must putrefy and rot, yet its Power and Virtue live, and in the mean while there grow out of its Power, in its Mother, fair beautiful Roses, Blossoms and Flowers. And though it were quite burnt up and consumed in the Fire, yet its Power and Virtue stands in the four Elements in the Word, and the Soul qualifies, mixes, or unites therewith; for the Soul is in Heaven, and the same Heaven is every where, even in the Midst or Center of the Earth.

(23) There spring up also in these Powers and Virtues, all Manner of Blossoms and Flowers, with fair Heavenly Colours and Smells.

(80) But if thou sayest, it has but one Kind of Birth or Geniture, thou speakest again also like one that is blind; for the Herbs and Wood, which grow out of it, are not Earth, neither is the Fruit which grows upon a Tree Wood; so also the Power and Virtue of the Fruit is not God neither; but God is in the Center in the innermost Birth in all the three natural Births or Genitures, hiddenly, and is not known, but only in the Spirit of Man; also the outermost Birth in the Fruit does not comprehend, conceive, or contain him, but he contains the outermost Birth of the Fruit, and forms it. Another Question is, [Note, how God is in all Things, yet no Creature is He.] Why then is the Earth so mountainous, hilly, rocky, stony and uneven? Answer.