Natural Magic

...the most excellent things original: "fima," likely the conclusion of "purissima" or "excellentissima" from the preceding page. we have veiled with a certain artifice, such as by the transposition and suppression of words. Those things which are harmful and malicious, we have obscured; yet not in such a way that a very clever person cannot uncover and perceive them. Nor have we made them so clear that they are exposed to the ignorant crowd; not so hidden that the mind of a searcher cannot grasp them, nor so open that they promise the same things in the inner recesses as they do on the surface. We have added some useful and well-known things because they are most true. Sometimes, from the most familiar and even the commonest things, one arrives at useful and lofty matters which the mind can barely perceive. Our intellect, unless it rests upon the truest principles, cannot contemplate high and sublime things. Mathematical science Mathematica scientia: here referring to the logical method of starting from simple, self-evident axioms to prove complex truths. rises from certain trite and common starting points to many arduous and sublime heights; hence it seemed better to write true and useful things rather than false and grand ones. True things, however small they may be, provide a handle original: "ansam," a common Latin metaphor for an opportunity or a starting point for further discovery. for thinking out greater things.

The incomprehensible and infinite multitude of things extends to infinity, and it is greater than can be considered by men. In our writing, we will set down the works of our ancestors or more recent authors; next, we reveal whether they were true or false as tested by our own experience; afterward, we present our own discoveries, so that the learned may see how remarkably the age of the moderns has surpassed antiquity. For there are many who have written about things they had never seen, and did not even know the simple components entering the work, but described them through the traditions of others with a certain innate and troublesome zeal for adding more. Thus, errors are successively propagated, and finally increase so immensely that not even the footprints The text cuts off here, likely leading to "not even the footprints of truth remain."...

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