Concealment and names

Use in the book

Pages 44–452 state the paradox most directly: everyone has the thing before the eyes and can name it, but very few recognize it. The refusal to supply that name is therefore not a claim that the object is linguistically unknown. On page 64 its countless philosophical names explicitly help hide it from the unworthy. Page 111 gives Omnia a different emphasis: it is called all things because all material things come from it and can be predicated of it. The same abundance that expresses universality also enables false identifications, which is why the wax-nose warning stands beside it.

Withholding applies to description as well as naming. Page 55 says that further requisites, conditions, qualities, and properties have deliberately been left out, including to prevent indiscriminate access. Page 80 says a few words could greatly aid recognition but reserves them for their proper time, person, and place. Pages 107–1082 then describe the scarcity of plain statements in process-books, handwritten and printed alike: the ordinary name, true resolution, and use are rarely set out clearly. The silence belongs to the expected structure of philosophical communication.

Pages 144–1452 give the restriction a social form. Khunrath will not publicly tell everyone who has prepared or possessed the Stone; fuller demonstration is reserved for fitting occasions and previously agreed conditions. Nor should the secret of recognition be made indiscriminately public. This does not mean the present treatise has no teaching to offer. It proposes distinctions, tests of candidates, warnings against false grounds, and a defence of warranted recognition. Its promise is to direct and protect inquiry, rather than to abolish the distinction between a general readership and trusted instruction.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 44The thing has a public ordinary name that the whole world can use, while recognition remains rare.
2. 1599 p. 55Further identifying properties are expressly omitted for sufficient reasons and restricted access.
3. 1599 p. 64Countless names are said to conceal the Chaos from the unworthy.
4. 1599 p. 107Process-books rarely give the ordinary name or explicitly state the true resolution and use.
5. 1599 p. 111Omnia names the universal matter by what may be predicated of it, opening a different source of verbal multiplicity.
6. 1599 p. 145Public indiscriminate disclosure of recognition is refused, continuing the conditions for demonstration from page 144.

Translation in this edition

The edition's Own Name or proper Name should not be read as the announcement of a hidden technical label. Page 107 expressly adds that it is the name the thing has among ordinary people. Conversely, 'philosophical names' are not automatically equivalent clues with which this companion could reconstruct a modern substance.