PREFACE

...to whom I write this present letter, in which you will find many things concerning the requests [made], partly in a philosophical style, and partly in a medical style, as seems appropriate to the subject matter. The author distinguishes between "philosophical" (theoretical causes of nature) and "medical" (practical application for health) approaches. For I have written this, asking for your steadfastness, so that you might be resolute and secretive regarding this work and business, lest you permit any boy—whether in age or in character—to come into its presence. A common warning in medieval "books of secrets," suggesting that the content is too mature or dangerous for the "youthful" or morally undisciplined. And if you do this, I promise to reveal more to you about these and other things, and to transmit [knowledge] with the present work and art for a medical purpose, which I shall provide at greater length, God willing.

Here he shows the cause which might excuse him from the labor of this task, and the meaning is clear from the text. Note that the author says a youthful and small mind original: "mens iuvenilis & pusilla" held him back; here he avoids arrogance, because a mind is called "small" when it is imbued with small conditions of knowledge. Thus the intellect the faculty of the mind used for understanding abstract truths, strictly speaking, is not small in itself nor by accident, because the intellect is not stretched by extension or diminished by reduction. The commentator is using Aristotelian logic to explain that the human mind doesn't have a physical size; "smallness" is just a metaphor for a lack of experience. Note that appetite in this context, an internal drive or desire is threefold, namely natural, [sensitive], and intellectual. The text likely omits "sensitive" due to a scribal or printing error, as the traditional medieval "threefold appetite" includes natural (inorganic), sensitive (animal), and intellectual (human) drives. For this purpose, the text speaks of "appetite," that is, natural intellect. Hence that priest, by a natural appetite, desired to know the natures of women; for men by nature [desire] to know... The text ends mid-sentence, referencing the famous opening of Aristotle's Metaphysics: "All men by nature desire to know."