University of the World

Use in the book

The body distinguishes a lover of wisdom from a lover merely of silver or gold. His principal labour seeks true wisdom from the Book of Nature through fire-art; other benefits, including transmutation, may follow by God's will. Beside this account the margin says that fire expounds the natural book surely. The professor is not a human authority whose name settles the case, but an agency through which natural things become intelligible.

The image connects two concerns developed elsewhere. Pages 142–1432 require a fire-artist to read the collected natural letters and investigate their ink. Pages 171–1722 deny that burning coal and handling materials produce knowledge without reasonable observation and reflection. The professor metaphor therefore does not praise expenditure of fuel for its own sake. It values what the work teaches when rightly attended to.

The term 'ordinary' belongs to the learned title rather than reducing fire to something trivial. Khunrath's conjunction of God, world, physics, book, and exposition makes the university a comprehensive setting for natural instruction. The primary gloss does not describe an actual academic appointment or institutional curriculum; it relocates their language into the relation between Nature and the philosophical learner.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 143The fire-artist’s reading of natural letters supplies the practical setting for the later teaching metaphor.
2. 1599 p. 154 · marginFire is named God’s ordinary professor of physics in the university of the world and expounds Nature’s book.
3. 1599 p. 172Observation and philosophical reflection distinguish learning from mere labour and fuel consumption.

Translation in this edition

The supplied edition adopts Khunrath's Errata correction Mundana for Muudana in this gloss. 'University of the World' thus rests on authorially corrected primary wording. The Latin title is kept as a metaphor rather than paraphrased as a modern research laboratory.