prima materian.

a1586 Sir P. Sidney Apol. Poetrie (1595) sig. H3 The quiddity of..Prima materia will hardely agree with a Corslet.

1663 T. Jordan Royal Arbor Loyal Poesie 16 All things were retrograde, the night and day Were shrinking to Prima Materia.

1755 Philos. Trans. 1754 (Royal Soc.) 48 859 This internal sulphur is probably what Albertus Magnus means by the humidum unctuosum subtile, which, he says, is the prima materia metallorum.

1857 G. H. Lewes Biogr. Hist. Philos. 5 The step taken by Thales was twofold in its influence:—first, to discover the Beginning, the prima materia of all things..secondly, to select from among the elements that element which was most potent and omnipresent.

1891 Science 28 Aug. 115/2 Was there prima materia—pantogen, protyle, urstoff—out of which the atom was formed by reduplication of urstoff upon itself.

1906 W. B. Yeats Poems, 1899–1905 p. xii I know I have been busy with the Great Work, no lesser thing than that, although it may be the Athanor has burned too fiercely, or too faintly and fitfully, or that the prima materia has been ill-chosen.

1969 K. Minogue in G. Ionescu & E. Gellner Populism 209 Nationalism has supplied them with a vocabulary suitable to their self-assertion expressing their claim to be unique and valuable, rather than simply indistinguishable prima materia fit for the inevitable process of industrialization.

1994 W. R. Newman Gehennical Fire p. xiii The term philosophical mercury..could designate not merely the ‘first matter’ of the elixir but the prima materia or basic ingredient of metals in general.