es, and memoirs to be
constant and habitual impressions, and having wholly fixed the sciences,
as having stability and firmness, they presently place under them a
basis and seat of a slippery substance, easy to be dissipated and in
perpetual flux and motion.

Now the common conception of an element and principle, naturally
imprinted in almost all men, is this, that it is simple, unmixed, and
uncompounded. For that is not an element or principle which is mixed;
but those things are so of which it is mixed. But these men, making God,
who is the principle of all things, to be an intellectual body and
a mind seated in matter, pronounce him to be neither simple nor
uncompounded, but to be composed of and by another; matter being
of itself indeed without reason and void of quality, and yet having
simplicity and the propertv of a principle. If, then, God is not
incorporeal and immaterial, he participates of matter as a principle.
For if matter and reason are one and the same thing, they have not
rightly defined matter to be reasonless; but if they are different
things, then is God constituted of them both, and is not a simple but
compound thing, having to the intellectual taken the corporeal from
matter.

Moreover, calling these four bodies, earth, water, air, and fire, the
first elements, they do (I know not how) make some of them simple and
pure, and others compound and mixed. For they maintain that earth and
water hold together neither themselves nor other things, but preserve
their unity by the participation of air and force of fire; but that
air and fire do both fortify themselves by their own strength, or being
mixed with the other two, give them force, permanence, and subsistence.
How, then, is either earth or water an element, if neither of them
is either simple, or first or self-sufficient, but if each one wants
somewhat from without to contain and keep it in its being? For they have
not left so much as a thought of their substance; but this discourse
concerning the earth has much confusion and uncertainty, when they say
that it subsists of itself; for if the earth is of itself, how has it
need of the air to fix and contain it? But neither the earth nor water
can any more be said to be of itself; but the air, drawing together
and thickening the matter, has made the earth, and again dissolving
and mollifying it, has produced the water. Neither of these then is an
element, since something else has contributed being an