A Shapely and Handsome Fable, chapter 4

Shapely and Handsome made observations on essences that some people called elements. One essence gives shape to air, gaseous; another essence gives shape to earth, grain or similar; water makes drops; about fire, the theory was there must be some designate frame, because there are flames.

Water spurred curiosity about physical gates, chip from an ice block or snowflake. People asked if one shape could turn into another owing to planes as they knew from planimetry.

Creation through planes would preserve some positions, but not necessarily all points, said Shapely and Handsome. Only “things that happen” would be sustained. Effected bodies were also called figures, and we think the story could be that of molten stone.

In creation from a principle, and not from a body, the creative principle would have all the origins for forming, and those might be in part like the side of Non-Being, said the philosophers as if to speculate about stone that has shape from a mold. Shapes were either essences or combinations of essences.

“All bodies are figured in the place which contains them”, forwards philologue Taylor. Even if to create from Non-Being really, it would still require room.

We have learned that simple bodies could be as elements in the Mendeleev. In this sense, altered in figure, water might no longer be water you can drink, but elemental shapes, as snow flakes or liquid water drops, could be no different.

In all change there is something without form, or something generated only in part, said the philosophers as if looking at molds and comparing shapes by a sculptor who works from a body of rock.

The qualities of heat or cold, moisture or dryness, all are correlate with the essences, and they are all subject to “passion”, that is, division in effect. For cold stone, you’d say it cannot resist chisels. In its extreme, division may terminate continuity, said the philosophers. Not only Michelangelo would understand them.

If not imagined or virtual, earthly planes, even if very planimetric, are never without depth. One reason may be earthly intolerance to vacuum. For a scientific illustration on “the figure of water”, we may try an article about Nuclear-spin-forbidden revibrational transitions of water from ■Cornell University.