Cost, labour, and loss

Use in the book

The main introduction acknowledges that diligent seekers, including eminent people, have spent heavily without success and ended in irrecoverable loss and ridicule. This concession prepares the catalogue of authorities meant to preserve belief in the art despite failure. Expense is evidence of misdirected pursuit, not proof that the art itself is impossible.

The conclusion contrasts true aid to Nature with the crooked paths and distant mountains of gold promised by sophistical masters. Their work consumes money and effort and may finally cost bodily life. The author specifically warns against people who offer to teach for money or invoke an unaffordable initial investment. He then claims a very small total cost for the universal work but expressly excludes daily food and maintaining the fire. Those exclusions prevent the headline sum from representing all costs of pursuing it.

Nature's dialogue similarly rebukes stained vessels, wasted time, and needless expenditure, while saying that a suitable undertaking needs no enormous outlay. The Way of Truth intensifies the charge: false operation-language allegedly leads followers into poverty, enriching apothecaries while impoverishing the worker's family and exposing the worker to dangerous fumes. Its satire makes technical verbs consume their practitioners' possessions: money dissolves, household vessels fly away, clothes rot, and fuel becomes ash.

This is a moral and practical economy of knowledge. Ignorance does not merely produce a wrong answer; it damages households, bodies, and relations to other people. Yet modest expense is also part of the authors' self-authorizing rhetoric. The lexicon does not endorse the promised returns or infer that a cheap material can safely be handled.

Places to read

1. Opening explanation · unit 5Unsuccessful pursuit consumes resources and ends in ridicule.
2. Conclusion · unit 6True art is said to cost little; false art consumes money, labour and possibly life.
3. Conclusion · unit 7Offers to sell instruction or requests for capital for allegedly expensive work are treated as signs of deceit.
4. Conclusion · unit 9The universal work is claimed to cost at most three florins excluding subsistence and fuel maintenance.
5. Nature’s Demonstration to the Erring Alchemist · unit 7False cooking wastes time and expense.
6. Nature’s Demonstration to the Erring Alchemist · unit 10Nature denies that very great outlay is required.
7. Way of Truth · unit 6Invented difficulty allegedly drives followers into poverty.
8. Way of Truth · unit 17The practitioner enriches apothecaries and impoverishes family.
9. Way of Truth · unit 24Money and possessions are the things that really dissolve in false practice.

Translation

The English distinguishes “outlay” and “investment” from continuing food and fire-maintenance. It also preserves the Via's wordplay by making money “melt and vanish” in the satire. Rendering all these terms simply as “cost” would flatten the difference between inputs, sustenance, and destructive loss. The historical florin claim is retained as a bounded claim with explicit exclusions, not converted into a modern currency estimate.

Attested forms

Mühe vnnd Kosten; vnwiderbringlichen Schaden; Hohn vnnd Spott; Kosten; vergebliche mühe; leib vnd Leben; Verlag vnd Kosten; vmb Gelds willen; drey Floren; Narung; vnterhaltung des Feuwers; Zeit vnd Vnkost; Verlag; Vnkosten; Armut; Apotheker; Gelt vnd Guth; zerschmoltzen