Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

iv. That he has not made it

The most startling thing in the treatise is that Khunrath concedes he has never made the Stone, and that the book’s longest sustained argument exists to defend the concession.

The objection is put in direct speech at p. 130, and it is the sharpest thing said against him in the book: Hat doch Doctor Khunrath noch nichts gewisses in der Kunst / wie darff er dann also gewis / von MAGNESIA reden? Er las die jenigen daruon reden / die allbereit transmutiret haben — Doctor Khunrath has as yet nothing certain in the Art; how then does he dare speak so certainly of Magnesia? Let him leave the speaking of it to those who have already transmuted.

The answer runs from p. 129 to p. 137 and is not a claim but a reduction. If certainty came only after success, the first Philosopher of all could never have begun, for he would have had to work through every material in the whole nature of things before finding the one right one, which would have been impossible (pp. 130–131). Bernard of Treviso, who says he knew the Art two years before he completed the Stone, must then have lied grievously — a thing credible with no son of doctrine (pp. 131–133). The author of the Rosarium had seen the Philosophical Work no further than the Lion (p. 134). Bonus of Ferrara confesses he was Operationi & labori … rarò dediti, but seldom given to operation and labour (pp. 134–135). Each of them wrote with authority, and none of them could have done so if the objection held. Then the generalization: true Philosophers knew it, and they knew it either by special divine inspiration, or from a well-knowing human schoolmaster, or out of the Light of Nature by diligent reading, contemplation and observation (pp. 135–136).

At p. 162 he says it outright, and without hedging: Ob Ich schon nimmermer erlebete / das Ich Lapidem Philosophorum vollkömlich daraus præpariren möchte … vnd zur Transmutation Metallorum dadurch jemals gereichte / wolte Ich mir dannoch deswegen keine grawe Hare wachsen lassen — even if I should never live to prepare the Stone perfectly out of it, and never through it came to the transmutation of metals, I would not for that let a grey hair grow on me. He would still keep the recognition of the true Magnesia, and still be and remain a true Philosopher. What is lacking in the preparation, God can give in His own time.

This is the axis of the book. It is why Agnitio, recognition, and not transmutation is what the treatise is for, and why a man may transmute and still know nothing — of which p. 155 gives the converse case, that none of the public tingents ever prepared the Stone a second time, as Bernard did four times in his old age.