Gold and silver

Use in the book

The companion introduces the metals at 231c after disease and health have defeated acquisition in general as an account of gain. He says that he does not mean something bad, but the case of spending less gold or silver and getting more. This is an attempt to secure the definition by restricting its objects to familiar valuables. Socrates tests whether that restriction makes “more” unambiguous.

He asks about giving half a weight of gold and receiving double in silver. The companion immediately judges the result a loss because the gold, instead of commanding twelve times its weight, yields only twice its weight. Socrates insists that more has nevertheless been received, prompting the qualification “not in worth.” The important contrast is between a larger physical receipt and a smaller value.

The example shows that neither the names of valuable materials nor an increase in weight guarantees gain. Gold is not simply “good” and silver “bad”: the same silver could be advantageous at another price or quantity. What matters is the relation between the outlay and what comes back. The text’s later shorthand that the silver is not of worth should therefore be read in its immediate comparative setting before being generalized to an absolute claim about silver.

The source’s note explains the passage with a twelve-to-one valuation: half a unit of gold would be worth six units of silver, whereas the exchanger receives one. That is the edition’s explanatory model. The Greek’s compressed half/double comparison leaves its reference quantities partly implicit, and this lexicon does not silently replace it with a newly regularized equation. The loss of worth remains clear under the explanatory model and under a same-unit reading that takes the silver receipt as two units.

The episode does not warrant treating twelve-to-one as an invariant market law. The supplied note itself compares Herodotus’ thirteen-to-one reckoning. Its historical reference is an aid to the example, not a claim that a single ratio governed every place and period.

Places to read

1. 231cχρυσίον ἢ ἀργύριον — The companion narrows the proposed definition to gold or silver.
2. 231dχρυσίου σταθμὸν ἥμισυν — Gold is specified by weight in Socrates’ test.
3. 231dδιπλάσιον λάβῃ ἀργυρίου — The silver receipt is described as double.
4. 231dΟὔτι τῇ ἀξίᾳ γε ἀργύριον χρυσίου — The companion distinguishes silver’s amount from its worth relative to gold.

Translation in this edition

The translation gives “gold or silver,” avoiding the ambiguity of “money” at exactly the point where difference of material matters. The ratio and Herodotus reference come from the edition’s note 22; no fresh verification of ancient prices or monetary standards is claimed here.

Use in the book

Traherne repeatedly lowers them beneath common goods whose real services are greater. The child has to be taught the hidden social conventions by which a purse of gold becomes desirable; water, light, and a living body require no such artificial elevation. Yet the argument is not that metals can never have value. Gold gains a legitimate worth through its relations to food, clothing, exchange, and an owner’s needs. Gold also remains a measure of preciousness in the childhood vision, where ordinary dust and stones are valued as highly as gold. The target is disordered comparison and exclusive accumulation.

Places to read

1. I.14Fertile earth is said to be better than gold.
2. III.9The child struggles to learn the socially mediated value of money and ornament.
3. III.53Scarce precious things are compared with the serviceableness of common gifts.
4. III.55Gold is granted relational value through the uses and exchanges it makes possible.
5. III.3Gold supplies a comparison for the child’s valuation of ordinary dust and stones.

In this edition

Do not turn every favourable gold-image into approval of avarice, or every criticism of money into denial of all exchange-value. The passage may concern natural usefulness, social convention, or poetic lustre.

Use in the book

Khunrath’s argument seems at first hostile to metals because pages 60–6223 deny that universal first matter can be extracted from them. The reason is their accomplished nature: they are already specified, strongly coagulated fruits. Subtle preparation does not cancel that specification. Their perfection as metals is precisely what prevents them from being the universal, uncommitted starting ground.

The formal objection beginning on page 87 asks how this can agree with the Philosophers’ teaching that the Art lies in metals. The answer grants a substantial role to them. Silver-ness and gold-ness exist in silver and gold, whether ripe or embryonated; like must beget like. Thus anyone seeking a silver-making or gold-making special medicine requires the corresponding metallic determination. What remains necessary is regeneration through the appropriate catholic field, since ordinary metallic perfection is not yet more-than-perfection.

Gold and silver therefore occupy several positions in the argument: fruits of Nature’s earlier generation, seeds for an artful regeneration, perfected metals to be exalted, and the upper kinds into which lower metals are allegedly transmuted. The same object can be a fruit in one relation and a seed in another. It cannot, however, serve as its own field merely because it contains its own seed.

Page 112 adds an interpretive caution. A philosophical author may call the Mercury and Sulphur hidden in Magnesia gold and silver. Or he may mean the actual metals employed for the special Stones. The distinction protects Khunrath’s main claim against a literal reading of every apparently metallic authority.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 60The metals are denied as a source of the universal first matter because they are specified.
2. 1599 p. 61The already perfected metals are described as hard-coagulated fruits.
3. 1599 p. 89Silver and gold remain necessary as the bearers of their own metallic natures.
4. 1599 p. 95The metallic fruit now functions as seed in a regeneration field.
5. 1599 p. 112Philosophical gold and silver may name the principles hidden in Magnesia.
6. 1599 p. 120The whole metal, rather than sulphur alone, bears the relevant metallic character.

Translation in this edition

Retaining both the metallic names and Sol/Luna makes the lexical equivalences visible, but “philosophical” must not be omitted where it changes their referent. The book does not give a modern compositional account of gold or silver; its statements are claims within a theory of generation and specification.