Possibility of Nature

Use in the book

The phrase enters a dispute about what authorities mean. An opponent may quote as much as he likes from the Philosophers, but their sayings must be understood according to natural possibility, rather than the bare sound of their words. Khunrath strengthens the point with an unusually explicit ranking of loyalties: Geber, Ripley, and Paracelsus are friends, but Nature's truth is a greater friend. Named allegiance therefore remains subordinate to the criterion that gives a claim its intelligibility.

Pages 111–1122 explain why this is needed. Since innumerable predicates can be applied to the universal matter, an interpreter can make selected sayings appear to identify almost any substance. Verbal fit is therefore insufficient. Reasoning from what Nature permits is safer than reasoning from a book's bare letter. In the surrounding argument, Nature's possibility is expressed through limits: specified things do not simply lose their specification; a seed is not its own field; separating essential components does not make them primordial principles. Those distinctions give content to the rule. They are not permissions for an unrestricted allegory.

The criterion also tests claims that appear to bypass the bookish problem altogether. At pages 158–16023, the would-be demonstrator promises lasting transmutation with still raw matter. Khunrath rejects the claim before accepting the spectacle as evidence, because regeneration and other qualifications must first have occurred. His appeal to Nature is thus both enabling and excluding: it explains why the Art can be pursued, and why some proposed shortcuts cannot belong to it. The reader can recognize here a tension rather than dissolve it. Experience is praised, but the meaning and credibility of an experience remain governed by a prior account of natural order.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 109The Philosophical rule subordinates the interpretation of sayings to Nature's possibility.
2. 1599 p. 109 · marginThe Artist's straight-edge governs study and labour, and Nature's truth outranks named friends among the authorities.
3. 1599 p. 112Reasoning from natural possibility is judged safer than proceeding from the bare letter of books.
4. 1599 p. 117Essential parts must not be confused with pri-material principles, giving the interpretive rule a specific ontological application.
5. 1599 p. 159The unprepared matter's alleged immediate efficacy is ruled contrary to Nature's possibility and will.

Translation in this edition

Keeping possibility is important: probability would turn the rule into a judgement of likelihood, while natural law would supply a terminology the passage does not use. The source joins possibility to truth and will, and gives it the practical image of a straight-edge. Those are the terms by which its force should be explained.