ened, and in turn it dissolves and melts again by heat.
The seas likewise, we find, when agitated by winds, grow warm, so that
from this fact we may understand that there is heat included in that
vast body of water; for we cannot imagine it to be external and
adventitious heat, but such as is stirred up by agitation from the deep
recesses of the seas; and the same thing takes place with respect to
our bodies, which grow warm with motion and exercise.

And the very air itself, which indeed is the coldest element, is by no
means void of heat; for there is a great quantity, arising from the
exhalations of water, which appears to be a sort of steam occasioned by
its internal heat, like that of boiling liquors. The fourth part of the
universe is entirely fire, and is the source of the salutary and vital
heat which is found in the rest. From hence we may conclude that, as
all parts of the world are sustained by heat, the world itself also has
such a great length of time subsisted from the same cause; and so much
the more, because we ought to understand that that hot and fiery
principle is so diffused over universal nature that there is contained
in it a power and cause of generation and procreation, from which all
animate beings, and all those creatures of the vegetable world, the
roots of which are contained in the earth, must inevitably derive their
origin and their increase.

XI. It is nature, consequently, that continues and preserves the world,
and that, too, a nature which is not destitute of sense and reason; for
in every essence that is not simple, but composed of several parts,
there must be some predominant quality--as, for instance, the mind in
man, and in beasts something resembling it, from which arise all the
appetites and desires for anything. As for trees, and all the vegetable
produce of the earth, it is thought to be in their roots. I call that
the predominant quality,[122] which the Greeks call [Greek:
hegemonikon]; which must and ought to be the most excellent quality,
wherever it is found. That, therefore, in which the prevailing quality
of all nature resides must be the most excellent of all things, and
most worthy of the power and pre-eminence over all things.

Now, we see that there is nothing in being that is not a part of the
universe; and as there are sense and reason in the parts of it, there
must therefore be these qualities, and these, too, in a more energetic
and powerful degree, in that part