Weight and Measure

Use in the book

Page 46 assigns the Artist the task of rightly recomposing and reuniting purified parts in their right weight. This is a genuine technical requirement. It prevents the work from being represented as arbitrary mixing, yet the requirement is not accompanied by numbers, units or a ratio. Knowledge that a right proportion exists is not possession of that proportion.

Page 48 turns to Nature’s generation. The special seminal powers specify universal matter as one mineral or metal rather than another, with mixing and union in determinate weights and measures known to Nature alone. The claim is embedded in the explanation of how catholic matter becomes a specified natural thing. It is therefore narrower than a blanket assertion that no human can know anything about material composition.

Khunrath returns to the problem in the margin of page 143. The body boasts of reading Nature’s letters and understanding the ink from which she composed them. The gloss expressly denies a contradiction with page 48 because that earlier page spoke only of weight and measure. This backward reference is particularly valuable: it distinguishes recognition of the source and nature of the constituents from an exhaustive grasp of Nature’s quantitative ordering.

Taken together, the passages resist two opposite simplifications. It is inaccurate to say that the treatise has no proportions or technical requirements; right weight is expressly demanded. It is equally inaccurate to reconstruct a working ratio from the demand itself, or to treat the symbolic number series as concealed masses. The text presents lawful composition as an intelligible order whose operative quantities remain undisclosed.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 46The pure parts are to be rightly recomposed in the right weight.
2. 1599 p. 48Natural specification proceeds in determinate weights and measures known to Nature alone.
3. 1599 p. 143Knowledge of Nature’s composing ink is claimed as part of reading her material book.
4. 1599 p. 143 · marginKhunrath explicitly reconciles that claim with page 48 by limiting the earlier statement to weight and measure.

Translation in this edition

“Right weight” should not be made to sound like a measured quantity supplied in the book. The page 143 marginal reference also limits the stronger modern introductory claim that the numbers are simply not the Artist’s to have: the primary distinction concerns Nature’s specified quantitative ordering and the scope of what Khunrath claims to recognize.