Helmont was an exponent of another intuitive poetic-empirical inference—that gas is spiritualized matter, a hybrid entity between matter and spirit. (Etymologically speaking he is exactly right, since spirit meant gas from the beginning, specifically lung-air.)

For Helmont, gas was bound up with his ideas on matter, its relationship to spirit and soul, and indeed his religious cosmology as a whole.

When an object was converted into gas by chemical manipulation, it had lost its shape but had lost nothing essential. On the contrary, it had retained, and now displayed, its pure essence. This essence, the gas or archeus of the object, was not in the object but was the object itself in a volatile—spiritualized—form. Hence gas was matter and spirit at the same time—but not simple, inert matter, which Helmont believed to be water. It was matter specifically disposed or “sealed,” matter active and alive by virtue of form and function specific to it. It was spirit—but not one that was added, entering and directing matter from outside. In other words, gas represented what was specifically characteristic of each individual object; it was the material manifestation of individual specificity. Hence there were as many gases as there were individual objects. In this view, spirit and matter were regarded as two aspects of the same thing; this was a monistic and pluralistic view of a world consisting of monads (semina) and thus was opposed to a dualistic separation of matter and soul. Helmont believed that he had found in gas the empirical solution to the perennial problem of spirit and matter, soul and body. Seen in this light, gas was conceptually related to Aristotle’s entelecheia, but Helmont emphasized that the latter was an ens rationis, a product of human reason, whereas gas was divine truth and reality that could be visualized in the test tube.