Dr Dienheim

Use in the book

At II.081.1 a French poet’s verses are introduced as reported by Dienheim. The verse itself follows at II.081.2. It contests the saying that everything produces its like when applied to minerals. Plants and creatures with sensation nourish and reproduce themselves; metals do not feel or multiply through that same mode and take their being from elements in the earth. Dienheim is the mediator named in the attribution. He should not be called the poet merely because the poem appears under his reported authority.

At II.133.1 his own cited proposition is more compact: metals are generated from elements in the first instance without any seed or proximate matter. The words “in the first instance” matter. The claim concerns their original elemental generation, not a denial that later operations can involve prepared proximate matter or a ferment. The narrator sets it beside reports of reworked silver-mine residue, Bier’s emerald, and a grain of gold as support for the mineral argument.

The wider conclusion is that minerals differ from animals and plants in their mode of life and origin. Art cannot create a fly by giving elements a divine reproductive command, yet it may prepare a tincture in accordance with mineral nature. Dienheim’s maxim helps defend that distinction. It does not authorize manufacturing organisms from water or equate all uses of seed in the book.

At II.238.2 the narrator invokes Dienheim in a first-person ethical preference. He would rather some unworthy persons enjoy the benefit together with the worthy than deprive all the worthy together with the unworthy. The immediate context is the desire of honest physicians to recognize the medicine’s matter and the Christian command to love one’s neighbour. Publication is justified through the needs of those who might use knowledge well.

The preference does not abolish every restriction. The narrator subsequently defends withholding individual manipulations and urges a seal of silence on those who attain the arcanum. Disclosure and reserve coexist. Dienheim’s cited judgment supports communicating enough to assist worthy readers, while the author continues to distinguish that help from indiscriminate transfer of complete practical secrets.¹⁵⁰

Places to read

1. Part II · II.081.1; II.081.22Dienheim as mediator of the French verse on minerals and reproduction.
2. Part II · II.133.1The explicit proposition about first-instance elemental generation.
3. Part II · II.238.2The preference for benefiting worthy readers despite some unworthy recipients.
4. Part II · II.240.1; II.241.1; II.243.223The continuing limits on disclosure and the seal of silence.

Translation

D. and Dr. are rendered Dr, preserving the source’s title without implying a modern institutional qualification beyond what the passage establishes.

Primâ instantiâ is “in the first instance.” The seed and proximate-matter phrase remains attached to that qualification; dropping it would make the proposition more sweeping than the cited Latin.

Connections

Seeds and Generation of metals explain the physical proposition. Secrecy and publication and Charity explain the concluding preference. Authority and testimony helps keep a reported poem separate from a statement explicitly attributed to the reporter himself.

Anonymous author is relevant because the narrator can explain why he publishes while still declining to give his own name. The ethics of disclosure cannot be reduced to either complete publicity or complete concealment.

Cautions

The French poet is not securely identified by these cited passages, and Dienheim should not be made the poem’s author.

The argument for publication does not say every recipient is worthy or every secret should be disclosed.

D. Dienheim

D. Dienheim — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.081.1; II.238.2.

Dr. Dienheim

Dr. Dienheim — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.133.1.

absque ullo semine, seu materiâ proximâ

absque ullo semine, seu materiâ proximâ — Attested wording in the cited original passage. II.133.1.