Pontanus, the key and two hundred failures

Meaning

Pontanus supplies an attributed example of correct matter failing without the necessary secret fire. The key is the missing enabling principle, not merely a hidden name for the material.

I.4.6 reports two hundred attempts and uses them to distinguish possession of a subject from knowledge of what brings it to completion. The number dramatizes repeated unsuccessful work; it is not an independently checked experimental log. The same context denies that Nature produces herself, requiring an appropriate productive agency. This constrains later language of self-vivification without forcing the two formulations into a single slogan. The entry's practical lesson within the argument is insufficiency of matter alone, not a disclosed means of reproducing Pontanus' alleged success.

The English preserves “only key” and the counted failures. It does not transform the anecdote into a procedure or omit the nearby non-self-production statement.