casting a look on all that moves, I see nothing that ascends by its own proper motion. Water, indeed, rises in a glass, if we throw earth into it; but all will allow, that it is not from any levity that is in the water, but rather, that the earth, by falling to the bottom, makes the water ascend. Now, if water does not acknowledge levity as the cause of this motion upwards, why should air confess it, which ascends in like manner when pressed on by water? Why fire, which does the same? It will be said, I doubt not, that if the upward motion of the elements be not natural to them, it must be violent; whence this absurdity follows, that each obtains its place in the universe by force. To this I answer, that the elements not having the cause of these motions in themselves, they may, so far, be called violent; but that this violence is gentle, and nowise ruinous." - Meaning and context.">
QuotesCosmos
“

Now casting a look on all that moves, I see nothing that ascends by its own proper motion. Water, indeed, rises in a glass, if we throw earth into it; but all will allow, that it is not from any levity that is in the water, but rather, that the earth, by falling to the bottom, makes the water ascend. Now, if water does not acknowledge levity as the cause of this motion upwards, why should air confess it, which ascends in like manner when pressed on by water? Why fire, which does the same? It will be said, I doubt not, that if the upward motion of the elements be not natural to them, it must be violent; whence this absurdity follows, that each obtains its place in the universe by force. To this I answer, that the elements not having the cause of these motions in themselves, they may, so far, be called violent; but that this violence is gentle, and nowise ruinous.

— John Rey

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Now casting a look on all that moves, I see nothing that ascends by its own proper motion. Water, indeed, rises in a glass, if we throw earth into it; but all will allow, that it is not from any levity that is in the water, but rather, that the earth, by falling to the bottom, makes the water ascend. Now, if water does not acknowledge levity as the cause of this motion upwards, why should air confess it, which ascends in like manner when pressed on by water? Why fire, which does the same? It will be said, I doubt not, that if the upward motion of the elements be not natural to them, it must be violent; whence this absurdity follows, that each obtains its place in the universe by force. To this I answer, that the elements not having the cause of these motions in themselves, they may, so far, be called violent; but that this violence is gentle, and nowise ruinous." in the context of "" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Quote Image
Source: The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app

Tags

#John Rey#water#motion#elements#ascends#violent#levity#earth#cause#why#acknowledge#themselves
John Rey

About John Rey

John Rey (1583–1645) (or, in French) Jean Rey, was a physician of Périgord, France who in 1630 published a tract on calcination, or oxidation of metals, after being notified by Brun, an apothecary of Bergerac, France, of Brun's experiments (as early as 1629) on the calcination of tin. Brun had melted 2 pounds six ounces of tin, and after 6 hours the resulting calx weighed seven ounces more than the original tin. More than one hundred and forty years before Antoine Lavoisier, John Rey recognized that in the calcination of lead or tin, part of the air provided an increase in mass to the calcined metal oxide. His work was eclipsed first by the phlogiston theory and then later, by Lavoisier's discoveries disproving the existence of phlogiston. Lavoisier's oxygen theory confirmed Rey's earlier report, of which Lavoisier claimed he was unaware. After the presentation of Lavoisier's 1775 memoir at the Académie des sciences, Pierre Bayen (1725-1798) wrote a letter to Abbé François Rozier, director of the journal Observations sur la Physique, sur l'Histoire naturelle and sur les Arts, to ask him to publish an update notice, recognizing the priority Rey's work.