Ocellus Lucanus: On the Nature of the Universe

...I thought it would be such that, instructed by these prolegomena, you might experience my labors as more pleasant and at the same time more useful. In these, moreover, I considered that not to embrace the method which Averroes prescribed and observed would be like a sacrilege, since the unanimous consensus of the wise has conferred upon him the noble name of "The Commentator," and therefore has most surely urged that the norm established by him in commentaries must be followed exactly; for that which is most distinguished by any quality seems to confer it upon others (Metaphysics 2, t. 4). When he himself was about to explain Aristotle’s books on Physical Auscultation, he taught that one must first inquire with the greatest zeal into the purpose of the book, then its utility, order, division, proportion, the In the proem to the Physics: Averroes' method in explaining authors. mode of instruction, the title of the book, and finally the name of the author; since several of these heads are clearly evident from what the author advises in the first text, they will be explained here very briefly, to be declared more fully in their proper place, lest the reader be kept too long from tasting the most excellent doctrines of Ocellus—the more so because the antiquity of the author and the work, together with his Attic diction in this little book (which I observe to be Doric in a certain fragment by the same author that I have placed at the end of the work), excite an arduous difficulty which everyone will affirm is worth the effort to resolve in these prolegomena.

If, therefore, the purpose of the author be sought, no other witness is to be The purpose of Ocellus in this work. summoned than Ocellus himself, who proposes the nature of the universe to be illustrated by his contemplations—whether one chooses to look at the title of the work, or also at the first text of the first chapter—and at the same time he takes up for himself to weigh with sharp examination those individual things which philosophy, still stammering in that age (to use the words of Aristotle, Metaphysics 1. 50), was contemplating: namely, the generation of the universe, which was numbered among the first inquiries of nascent philosophy (Metaphysics 1, sum. 1, final chapter), and furthermore, the efficient cause,