Child’s play and women’s work

Meaning

The comparison with child's play and women's work is explicitly restricted to the subsequent work. The main treatise quotes a warning against engaging with the spirit without adequate knowledge, then reports deaths and serious injuries among rash practitioners. Only after establishing that danger does it correct those who infer that the whole enterprise must be trivial because philosophers used homely expressions for it.

The distinction is temporal and epistemic: the later work is described as easy in itself, and the modest expressions are addressed to readers already endowed with knowledge. They do not describe the hazardous preliminary work. The assurance about prayer at the passage's close belongs to its religious rhetoric and is not a modern guarantee of laboratory safety. The gendered comparison is the historical author's characterization of labour, not an assessment adopted by this lexicon.