As for the Philosophical Stone bequeathed by St. Dominic[193] to Albert and by the latter to St. Thomas Aquinas, we must understand it as the philosophical and religious basis of ideas prevalent at the period. Had St. Dominic been able to accomplish the Great Work he would have secured for Rome that empire of the world about which he was so jealous for the Church, and would have diverted the fire which consumed so many heretics to the heating of his own crucibles. St. Thomas changed all that he touched into gold, but this is a figure of speech only, gold being in this case an emblem of truth. It is opportune at this point to say a few further words concerning that Hermetic science cultivated from the first Christian centuries by Ostanes, Romarius, Queen Cleopatra, the Arabian Geber, Alfarabius and Salmanas, by Morien, Artephius and Aristeus.[194] Understood in an absolute manner, this science may be called the Kabalah in realisation, or the Magic of Works. It has therefore three analogous degrees—religious realisation, philosophical realisation and physical realisation. The first is the solid basis of empire and priesthood; the second is the establishment of an absolute doctrine and an hierarchic instruction; the last is the discovery and application, within the measures of the Microcosm or lesser world, of that creative law which peoples incessantly the greater universe. The law in question is one of movement combined with substance, of the fixed with the volatile, humid with solid. Its principle is divine impulsion, its instrument the universal light—ethereal in the infinite, astral in stars and planets, metallic, specific or mercurial in metals, vegetable in plants, vital in animals, magnetic or personal in men. This light is the quintessence of Paracelsus and is either latent or active in all created substances. Such quintessence is the true elixir of life, and it is extracted from earth by cultivation; from metals by incorporation, rectification, exaltation and synthesis; from plants by distillation and coction; from animals by absorption; from men by generation; from the air by respiration. In this sense we are told by Aristeus that air must be derived from air; by Khunrath that living mercury must be obtained from the perfect man formed by the androgyne; by practically all the sages, that the medicine of metals must be derived from metals and that this medicine—though fundamentally one in all kingdoms—is graduated and specified according to forms and species. Its use is threefold—by sympathy, repulsion or equilibrium. The graduated quintessence was only the auxiliary of forces; the medicine of each kingdom must be derived from the kingdom itself, with the addition of basic mercury—terrestrial or mineral—and of synthetic living mercury, or human magnetism.