First matter

Use in the book

Khunrath first makes the universal subject necessary to a universal result: the universal comes only from the universal. At pp. 47–4923 he distinguishes the first matter from the particular things generated out of it. God created it out of nothing and it was universally ensouled by Nature; vegetables, animals, minerals and metals were then fixed into particular kinds. The relevant subject preserves an equivalent first-material catholic condition in its own being. It is therefore not the aggregate of those already specified products.

The phrase changes scale without changing this logic. First matter of all material things is the broader proposition; first matter of all metals follows from it. Khunrath's correction of p. 51 from Metallorum to Materialium protects precisely that order. Treating both phrases as interchangeable would erase an inference he took trouble to restore in the errata.

The laboratory polemic adds a second distinction. A dissolved or finely divided metal does not thereby become first matter. Even what operators call the three essential parts of silver or gold remain products derived from a specified metal. The first matter which can return them to the required condition exists separately outside the metals: they originate from it, not it from them. Hence the recurrent formulation that reduction into first matter must occur through first matter. This is not an instruction to undo specification by any sufficiently aggressive preparation; it is Khunrath's criterion for excluding such shortcuts.

Finally, first matter remains a name used across preparation. In the account of the universal way it can be purified and perfect, then regenerated and more-than-perfected. Its priority is therefore not exhausted by a remote moment of creation. It names the persistent universal ground whose mode is changed by the work without the addition of a silvern or golden specification.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 12The universal subject is required before work toward the universal Stone begins.
2. 1599 p. 49The created and universally ensouled first matter supplies the comparison for Magnesia’s condition.
3. 1599 p. 51The broad first matter of all material things precedes the narrower inference about metals on p. 52.
4. 1599 p. 98First matter is named both before and after its more-than-perfecting.
5. 1599 p. 117The first matter subsists outside metals and is distinguished from the essential parts extracted from them.
6. ErrataMaterialium replaces Metallorum at p. 51, preserving the argument’s broader first term.

Translation in this edition

“First-material” and “pri-material” preserve the source's technical compounds. Neither should be flattened to “raw material.” The p. 51 correction is Khunrath's own, whereas modern interpretive statements about what first matter means belong to the edition's apparatus.