When therefore the quintessence is separated from that which is not
the quintessence, as the soul from its body, and itself is taken into
the body, what infirmity is able to
withstand
this so noble, pure,
and powerful nature, or to take away our life save death, which being
predestined separates our soul and body, as we teach in our treatise
on Life and Death.
John Donne
PAGE =33=. LOVES GROWTH.
ll. 7-8. _But if this medicine, &c._ 'The quintessence then is a
certain matter extracted from all things which Nature has produced,
and from everything which has life corporeally in itself, a matter
most subtly purged of all impurities and mortality, and separated from
all the elements. From this it is evident that the quintessence is,
so to say, a nature, a force, a virtue, and a medicine, once shut
up within things but now free from any domicile and from all outward
incorporation. The same is also the colour, the life, the properties
of things.... Now the fact _that this quintessence cures all diseases_
does not arise from temperature, but from an innate property, namely
its great cleanliness and purity, by which, after a wonderful manner,
it alters the body into its own purity, and entirely changes it....
When therefore the quintessence is separated from that which is not
the quintessence, as the soul from its body, and itself is taken into
the body, what infirmity is able to
withstand
this so noble, pure,
and powerful nature, or to take away our life save death, which being
predestined separates our soul and body, as we teach in our treatise
on Life and Death.
But by whatsoever method it takes place, the
quintessence should not be extracted by the mixture or the addition
of incongruous matters; but the element of the quintessence must be
extracted from a separated body, and in like manner by that separated
body which is extracted.' Paracelsus, _The Fourth Book of the
Archidoxies. Concerning the Quintessence_.
The O.E.D. quotes the first sentence of this passage to illustrate its
first sense of the word--'the "fifth essence" of ancient and mediaeval
philosophy, supposed to be the substance of which the heavenly bodies
were composed, and to be actually latent in all things, the extraction
of it ... being one of the great objects of Alchemy.' But Paracelsus
expressly denies 'that the quintessence exists as a fifth element
beyond the other four'; and as he goes on to discuss the different
quintessences of different things (each thing having in its
constitution the four elements, though one may be predominant) it
would seem that he is using the word rather in the second sense given
in the O.E.D.--'The most essential part of any substance, extracted by
natural or artificial processes.' Probably the two meanings ran into
each other.
