DiotimosReading Desk

Recognition and proof

Contemplation and inquiry

percontiren; contempliren; meditiren; Theosophischē contempliren; lernen vnd erkennen

Inquiry, contemplation, and meditation are active ways of attending to the secrets laid in the natural subject.

From the book

Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

Heinrich Khunrath · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordInquiry, contemplation, and meditation are active ways of attending to the secrets laid in the natural subject.
  • In KhunrathPage 63 says that Nature has already set the due universal subject before the Philosopher in its appointed place.
  • In this editionThe unusual verb percontiren is kept as an original-form route to the translation's 'question'.
  • A reading distinctionThe page 63 margin says Nature is never idle.

Meaning

Inquiry, contemplation, and meditation are active ways of attending to the secrets laid in the natural subject. They coexist with labour and observation rather than defining a separate, purely inward path. The terms are gathered here because the primary text gives them as connected practices rather than sharply separated faculties.

Use in the book

Page 63 says that Nature has already set the due universal subject before the Philosopher in its appointed place. Within it he is to labour chymically and universally, and from it question, contemplate, learn, and recognize God's secrets. Percontiren, rendered 'question', is especially revealing: the subject is something to investigate, not merely admire. The sequence proceeds toward recognition and presupposes a determinate natural thing furnished by Nature.

At page 136 contemplation and meditation are named as theosophical, alongside reading, understanding, and observation. Their objects are natural workings in the world and laboratory. The passage does not give a private exercise or sequence of mental techniques; it characterizes the reflective attention by which a practitioner learns from books and works under divine illumination. Pages 171–1722 clarify what is missing when that reflection is absent: effort and expenditure can continue without teaching the worker the grounds of his material.

These practices therefore help explain how certainty can precede completed preparation without being mere guesswork. Khunrath does not limit knowledge to the final spectacle, but neither does he treat an unexamined inner conviction as sufficient. The acts of questioning and considering connect the visible thing, the explanatory account, and the theological meaning. Their productivity is measured by better-grounded recognition, not by how intensely a claimant insists that he knows.

Places to read

  1. 1599 p. 63The Philosopher must question, contemplate, learn, and recognize the secrets in Nature’s due subject while labouring in it.
  2. 1599 p. 136Theosophical contemplation and meditation join reading and observation in the account of knowledge.
  3. 1599 p. 172Right philosophical reflection is required alongside reasonable observation of the works.

Translation in this edition

The unusual verb percontiren is kept as an original-form route to the translation's 'question'. It should not be silently modernized into interrogation of a human witness or into a particular spiritual discipline: the object here is what God has placed in the natural subject.

Source note

The page 63 margin says Nature is never idle. The reader's contemplative activity thus attends to an already active Nature; it is not a claim that human thought brings the subject into existence.