Cabbage, juice and marc

Meaning

II.3.4 introduces an objection as common opinion: cabbage juice loosens the bowels, while the marc, its pressed residue, binds them. The author’s answer is stricter than saying two nutritive portions act differently. If loosening belongs to the plant’s substance, he says binding cannot come from that same substance; the marc is excluded from it, rejected by the stomach as excrementitious and without nutritive power.

The nutritive virtue belongs to the substance and each part of it. More and less apply to actions and powers, not to essence. The surrounding hellebore example also distinguishes recipients and times: a plant can be beneficial to one body and fatal to another, but not nourish and kill the same recipient together. These are historical claims, not dietary or medical guidance; the printed effect in the wider argument is not silently changed to cause.