and able to appreciate the truth when found.

We, also, intending to explore the Intellectual Ground more fully hereafter, follow in its own willful order the Hermetic mind. (11) The vulture, according to our Scholiast, is the new born quintessential spirit or Proteus; the mountain upon which the vulture stands is a fit vessel placed in a well-built philosophic furnace encompassed with a wall of fire. In him all the multifarious virtues of nature are declared to be held in capacity, as in rapid evolution he passes about his axis, making the light manifest without refraction in every variety of its coloring and creative imagination. (12) The vulture and the crow are interpreted to be one and the same thing, only differing somewhat in estate. Whilst the Spirit of life appears active and devouring in the process, it has been called the vulture, and when it lies in a more obscured and passive condition, the crow. The vulture is the first sublimed quintessence not yet perfected by art; the crow is also in the infancy of that work wherein the revivified spirit is united with its solar ferment, The blackness of the night is the putrefaction of the same, and the clearness of the day signifies its resurrection to a state of comparative purity. IT flies without wings, being borne and carried by the fixed spirit; and the bitterness existing in the throat occultly indicates the death of the first life, whence the soul is ediced; which is also the red and living tincture taken from the body; and the thin water is the viscous humidity made by the dissolution which radically dissolves all metals, and reduces them into their first ens, or water. Montis in excelso consistit vertice vultur, Assidue clamans, Albus ego atque niger, Citrinus, rubeusque feror nil mentior: idem est Corvus, qui pennies absque volare solet Nocte tenebrosa emediaque in luce diei Namque ortis caput est ille vel iste tuae --- See The Scholium --- Atalanta Fugiens Emblema, xliii (13) Our author here, repeating his exception of the unintelligent, at the same time eloquently identifies the philosophic matter, calling it mens sublimes et mare patens. It is hidden in the caverns of the metals; that is to say, in the central motion of the mineral life, where the spirit is first coagulated and conceives itself into a concrete form. It is called a stone, say the adepts, and it a true mineral petrification: therefore Alphidus writes --- Si lapis proprium nomen haberet lapis esset nomen ejus; and Arnold --- Ii is a stone and no stone, spirit, soul, and body, which if thou dissolvest, it will be dissolved; and if thou coagulatest, it will be coagulated; and if thou dost make it fly, it will fly, for it is volatile and clear as a tear, etc. See Arnoldi Speculum --- Khunrath Amph. Isag. in fig. Cap. 3 (14) Many ways are mentioned by adepts of acting with their matter as by sublimation, calcinations, inceration, fixation, etc; which may all however be comprehended under the first term rightly understood; for the Hermetic sublimation, repeatedly operated over and over again, is the occasion of many changes in the matter and effects, which, though differently designated, are in their source the same. This sublimation is not, therefore, exactly to be conceived by analogy with the ordinary chemical process, which is a mere elevation of the subject to the top of the vessel; but the Hermetic sublimation is said to change the matte, qualifying and meliorating each time that it succeeds; urging on life, as it were, to the utmost exercise of vivacity, to save itself from death and a total disseveration. Concerning the peculiar nature, origin, and artificial excitation of the philosophic fire, we may more effectively inquire hereafter. --- See Ripley Revived; Lumen de Lumine; Introit. Apert., cap3 (15) The monitions to secrecy are no less stringent than frequent in the writings of adepts, modern as well as ancient. Thus, Raymond Lully, in his Thesaurus, gives the following charge: Juro tibi supra animaam meam quod si ea reveles, damnatus es: nam a Deo on=mne procedit bonum et ei soli debetur. Quare servabis et secretum tenebis illud quod ei debetur revelandum, etc. And Norton write --