THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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and left imperfect to be brought to completion: the doctor as philosopher, the philosopher as doctor thus stands wholly in this process of purification. The purification
occurs in a very broad sense alchemically: both as a removal of impure elements and as a heightening of virtus, efficiency, fullness of life. All this is to occur through truth
to nature, that is, the ‘imagination’ true to the natura naturans, which knows all about ‘quintessence’. This means in turn: about the extraction of the vital essence from
everything, about the continuation of the ‘maize of the great world’; even the Last Judgement is thus understood in moral­chem ical, chemical­moral terms. Jakob
Böhme follows — precisely related in such processing out — or the doctrine of the manifestation of the dark original ground through quaking, kraken, quality on
towards the kingdom of light. ‘If one wants to talk of God, what God is, one must diligently consider the forces in nature.’ But these (and this kind of thing had no
longer been heard since Heraclitus) are themselves a struggle between opposites. Thus to begin with: ‘Nature has two qualities in it, a lovely, heavenly and holy one,
and a fierce, hellish and thirsty one’ (Aurora, Preface 9); this is still reminiscent of the old Manichaean duality. But then comes the continuation: ‘All creatures are made
from these two sources, and everything which grows out of the earth, which lives and wells out of the force of these qualities …For through its double source everything
has its great mobility, running, racing, welling, sprouting and growing’ (l.c., Chap. 2, 1); this consequently passes from the Manichaean to objective dialectics. With
seven ‘welling spirits’ or ‘natural forms’, from the dry and bitter through the fire of lightning to warm light, to the peal of joy right up to the whole corpus naturae and to
Christ in man, ‘a thousand times greater than the Father’, i.e. than the undeveloped beginning or original ground. Thus the self­explication of the ground here is not only
its self­knowledge, as in Eckart, but apart from this its self­correction. As a theme which, minus the chemical nights and days with which it was coloured in Paracelsus
and Böhme, became everlasting from here on in the philosophy of process.
But now of course, although all this definitely intended thinking of light­becoming, it had not escaped from the fermentation of the latter. Its powerful internal and
external weather therefore still formed no separate strict counterpart to the Spinozism of the crystal. This counterpart is first given in that landscape, illuminating itself so
vigorously and extensively, which is described by Leibniz. Consequently by the thinker of genetic enlightenment, by the perception and explication of the world­content
developing in ever clearer, ever more distinct reflection. Nevertheless,