quote · Legacy record

With regard to this matter, we have said on the previous page that the definition of a spirit is a power united with a body, because it cannot move of its own accord nor acquire any kind of motion. And if you say that it moves itself, this cannot be within the elements, because if the spirit is an incorporate quantity this quantity is a vacuum and the vacuum does not exist in nature, and if it did exist it would be immediately filled by the rushing in of the element in which the vacuum was formed. So according to the definition of weight which runs: "Gravity is an accidental power created by one element attracted to or suspended in another," it follows that no element, weighing nothing in its own element, can have weight in the element which is above it and lighter than it; for instance, no one part of water has no more gravity or lightness than any other part, but if you were to draw it up into the air, it would acquire weight, and this weight cannot sustain itself by itself; and it must therefore inevitably fall, and thus wherever there is a vacuum in water it will fall in. The same thing would happen with a spirit among the elements where it would continuously generate a vacuum in whatever element it might find itself, for which reason it is inevitable that it would move in a constant flight to the sky until it had quitted these elements.

With regard to this matter, we have said on the previous page that the definition of a spirit is a power united with a body, because it cannot move of its own accord nor acquire any kind of motion. And if you say that it moves itself, this cannot be within the elements, because if the spirit is an incorporate quantity this quantity is a vacuum and the vacuum does not exist in nature, and if it did exist it would be immediately filled by the rushing in of the element in which the vacuum was formed. So according to the definition of weight which runs: "Gravity is an accidental power created by one element attracted to or suspended in another," it follows that no element, weighing nothing in its own element, can have weight in the element which is above it and lighter than it; for instance, no one part of water has no more gravity or lightness than any other part, but if you were to draw it up into the air, it would acquire weight, and this weight cannot sustain itself by itself; and it must therefore inevitably fall, and thus wherever there is a vacuum in water it will fall in. The same thing would happen with a spirit among the elements where it would continuously generate a vacuum in whatever element it might find itself, for which reason it is inevitable that it would move in a constant flight to the sky until it had quitted these elements.

Approximate author period: c. 1486 AD · medieval