General collection of questions dealt with in the address office conferences, on all kinds of subjects, by the finest minds of this time

Translated by Mitko Janeski

part from French book:

Recueil général des questions traitées dans les conférences du bureau d'adresse, sur toutes sortes de matières, par les plus beaux esprits de ce temps

CONTENTS

1. Morning dew.
2. If it is expedient for women to be scholars.

Translator Note:

Dear readers, like many false books I was also deceived and I believed that the subject is hidden in Morning Dew or Dew from Spring in the month of May, which is mentioned by Artephius. But this matter is named May-Dew in philosophical sense be not deceived by the words of the philosophers.

“Like begets its Like, Man is begot by a Man, a Lion by a Lion”

We cannot expect to make Man out of Lion, or Vegetable out of Metal because that’s against Nature and natural Reason.

Aristeus: “natures are attracted by their like; a fish is attracted by a fish - a bird by a bird”

Arnoldus de Villa Nova: “As out of a man is made another man, so out of one Noble Mettall is made another Mettall, and there is no transmutation, as some idle and simple men thinke.”

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TRANSLATION

If Pindar pierced the water so effectively that he could not have found a better place to start his Odes, then the celestial water, or Dew, deserves to be held in high regard because it surpasses it to the same extent that the Sky, from which she originates, is high above the earth.

For the source of the dew is the sky, from which it distills here below, imprinted with all the ethereal qualities: which gives it properties incomparable to anything else; whether it comes by a translocation of the celestial waters that the Hebrews call Maim, in the dual number, to signify the waters above and those below, or whether it is a quintessence & resolution of the Heavens, from which it proceeds, like the waters that the alchemists have distilled from the bodies placed in their stills, which restore the smell and other qualities, even if they are sometimes increased in power. Which some Theologians try to deduce as to why the manna, which is nothing more than this thick dew, had all kinds of tastes during the 49 years less a month that God used it for his people's food: for this, they say, the sky from which it proceeded containing eminently, as the equivocal efficient cause, all the forms of things, to the generation of which it contributes here below: It was used by God to represent the various species of each food. And honey, whose sweetness is so familiar to our nature, indeed so prized in Scripture, that God frequently promises nothing to his people in order to make them crave the land he had promised them, what is it? This other thing is the same condensed dew collected by honey flies, who take care of it by rubbing their thighs on the flowers and leaves of the plants on which this sweet liquor falls from above and will leave it in their hives.

This is why the Naturalists appear to me to be too crude, who want the dew to be only a vapor raised from the earth by the heat that the Sun lest in the air when setting, and which, in the absence of other sufficient heat, cannot rise higher than the tip of the grass: its subtlety and effects demonstrate the contrary. Its nuance is far greater than that of water: Witness the experience of those who raise an eggshell full of dew to the Sun along a slightly inclined spike: which would not happen if it were filled with ordinary water, no matter how rarefied it was. Its effects cause it to penetrate much more powerfully than common water, causing it to quickly whiten everything exposed to it, such as canvas and waxes; what the rains could not do in three times the time but its penetration still appears in that it dissolves even gold; which has given some reason to wash off the medicines which one wishes to penetrate several times, as well as with vinegar.

According to The 2, if one were to speak of the dew in the poetic style of the poets, one might refer to it as the sweat of the sky, the saliva of the stars, the flow of celestial waters, or the crystalline humor that emanates from the lovely Aurora's eyes: Alternately, she could be a beaded garland that the earth wears in the morning to enhance its beauty in the eyes of the Sun and the entire universe. If the vapors are the earth's food, the dew is its nectar and its ambrosia. But to speak more definitively about it, I believe it to be a held and delicate vapor, raised by moderate heat until it meets a body and adheres to it, or when it is drawn near the middle of the air, it condenses by the cold and returns to the earth. However, since its more subtle part has evaporated, the rest is still condensed on the leaves and stones, where honey and manna are made, and those who lightly run their tongue over the leaves of walnut and other linked and united plants will find there the sweetness of climates or temperate seasons, which is only an extract of this even dew. The earth becomes more fertile as a result, and its purgative and detergent properties sufficiently demonstrate this. For the dew could not make the earth fertile if it were pure water and devoid of all kinds of spirits, especially those of nitre, which is the most excellent fertilizer with which one can make the earth fertile: because that from which it was drawn remains fertile as long as it has been re-imprinted by these spirits by the influence of the dew, to which it is exposed for some time to make it capable of producing something. This purgative virtue of which not only the manna participates which benignly purges the serums; but the very pure dew which sometimes causes fatal diarrhea to the herds which it purges excessively, when it is not well cooked & digested by the heat of the Sun which consumes the phlegm, and this detergent faculty with which the dew cleanses all the impurities of the bodies which it whitens perfectly, can only come from this nitrous salt, which like all the other salts is penetrating and detergent. No more than this removal of the shell of an egg which can only be done by the virtue of certain light and volatile spirits, which being activated and fortified by the heat of the solar rays, move and take the top carrying with them the egg that encloses them; what an aqueous humor cannot do: for that even if the heat of the Sun could subtilize it, attenuate & rarefy it until it becomes of an aerial nature, which is the highest point of rarity to which it can reach, none the less it would not rather attract it than the rest of the air of the same nature, the less would it remove the shell of the egg: She would eventually burst or dissolve in smoke, with the heat only slowly rarefying and heating the water as she slowly perspired through the pores of the egg or expanded inside of it to the extent there was room for her to do so, which is insufficient to remove the vessel containing it because even if it were filled with heated air, it would still remain on the ground, The 3 asserts that because everything in nature is in a state of constant flux and reflux and is fed by the earth's basic elements so that they can return to their fundamental nature, the dew can be considered both the start and the finish of everything, the pearl or diamond that completes the nature's cyclical revolution. It condenses it again and returns to the earth where it serves as a seed to make it fruitful and transforms itself on it into everything, taking the qualities from the earth from which it derives. Then, drawn upwards by the Sun, the mass of water and the earth subtilized into vapor and arrived at the last point of its rarefaction: For this, that being only a quintessence extracted from this whole body, it must have eminently all its virtues: so anciently the ordinary blessing of fathers to their children was that of the dew, as being the germ of nature, the raw material of all goods & the consummation of all its substance, annealed & digested in the second region of air.

Even though the vapor that creates the dew in the morning also creates tranquility in the evening, the difference is still so great that, despite the fact that one is harmful, the other is beneficial: Because the first vapors that emerge from the earth's core have not yet been stripped of their coarse and harmful qualities, they can cause colds or cathars, whereas the vapors of the morning, which resolve into air condensed by the night's cold, lack the softness and benignity of this element. Alternatively, the pores of the body, which are opened by the heat of the day, are better able to absorb the harmful impressions of foreign humidity than when they have been tightened by the night The 4 states that although vapor is an imperfect mixture, it is still made up of various parts, some of which are coarse and others thin. The coarse parts of the vapor, which are made volatile by the foreign heat from which they are imprinted, rise up to the middle region of the air, where the coldness of the air condenses them into a cloud, which is typically resolved into rain: sometimes in snow or in hail in the first, when the cloud before being recast is made friable by the violence of the cold, which expressing the humidity, tightens the parts of the cloud which causes it to fall in flakes and fertilize it, when the same cloud having already melted into rain, its drops freeze like a dragee, either by the extreme cold of the air, or by the extreme heat of the same air, which increases by antiperistasis the coldness of the rain, makes it tighten & harden: why it hails both during the heat of summer and during the rigors of winter. And between these coarse parts of the vapor, those that cannot be altered or changed into a cloud, descending towards our region, clouds and fogs form, but the most held parts of this vapor produce dew, in which two things must be considered, matter and efficient cause.

Matter is this held vapor that is so subtle that it does not give way to heat; it is also too weak to cause him to lose ground. The distant efficient cause is a moderate heat: if it were too hot, it would consume or remove this steam: As a result, the dew only falls during the temperate seasons of Spring and Autumn, never in Winter or Summer: the first congealing these vapors, and the second resolving and consuming them. The next efficient cause is the coldness of the night, which must also be moderated: otherwise it would freeze them, not in dew, but in ice, or white frost, as the extreme cold of the air converts the waters into ice, as it converts the waters into ice by the extreme cold of the air: which must also be quiet & serene; for what being beaten & agitated by the winds, the vapor cannot condense for the same reason that prevents living waters, which Dew occurs more frequently in low areas than in high areas.

Now, just as vapor alone creates dew, if some very subtle terrestrial components rise primarily toward the morning with this retained vapor, a sweet juice is created, and as a result, honey is created: The best manna is gathered in Calabria because that of Briançon and some other places is less digested than it is. Manna is created when these terrestrial parts rise above the moist parts of the dew. The sweetness of this honey and this manna comes from a very perfect blending of the dry with the wet, to a degree unknown to us, and not necessary due to a lack of heat or mixed with too many impurities by an excess of ice that attracted them too violently from the earth.

On the second point, it was alleged that God endowed man with the power to maintain the dominance of women. Because tyranny and usurpation are sometimes associated with absolute power, it was claimed that this man not only reserved to himself the power to make laws, where women who were not called upon to do so always had the worst, but also appropriated the best things without wanting to share with them. Because of this, men are not content with sharing women's property so unfairly through successions, reducing them to perpetual guardianship, which is a real servitude, and making themselves the owners of their property in the name of husbands: continue to unfairly deprive them of the greatest of all goods, the good of the spirit, to which science is the most lovely ornament because it is the sole good of this world and the next. Science is also the noblest application of the understanding, the highest faculty of the soul that is shared by both men and women, and over whom they even appear to have the advantage of the spirit, not just for the delicateness of their flesh, which is a measure of mental goodness, but also for their curiosity, which is the mother of philosophy as it is defined for this topic. Their spirits are like those good lands that are abundant in grasses and thorns and are constructed of a higher culture. Love and a thirst for knowledge, as well as this vivacity in their babbling and in their ruses, plots, and deceptions. Because of their sedentary and solitary lifestyles as well as the wet constitution of their brains, their memory is still favorable. In addition, Saint Brigid, who was an expert in Mystical Theology, serves as an example: Cleopatra sister of Arsinoe, in Medicine: Pulcheria, in Politics: Hypetia & Athenais wife of Theodosius, in Philosophy: Sapphon & the Corrynnes, in Poetry: Cornelia mother of the Gracches & Tullia doubly daughter of Cicero, in eloquence, that if it is true that politics and economics are based on the same principles, and if it takes as much or more science to preserve than to acquire: since women are in a family what men are in the State, and that they are destined to preserve what men amass; why will they not have knowledge of the same maxims as men through study & theory, especially since the restraint & modesty of their sex does not allow them to experience them through frequentation of the world? Due to this, our prehistoric Gauls were forced to delegate to them the execution of the laws and other acts of peace, leaving only the acts of war.

Who doubts that if women worked alongside men to conduct research into the other sciences, since their encyclopedia contains a world with many areas that are still unexplored or infrequently visited; they would make amazing advancements and discover a variety of beautiful secrets that had previously remained undiscovered?

The 2 says women have taken sufficient dominance over men without granting them that of science, which, by inflating the mind, would make them even more superb and unbearable than before: good opinion of oneself being incompatible with the obedience to which women are destined. Also, we read that our first father, Adam, was learned, but not Eve, whose only challenge to become learned was to eat the fruit of the tree, which ruined everything. The active life of the household into which they were born, the delicacy of their bodies, impatient of the labors and sweats with which science is acquired, the humidity of their brains, the enemy of science, and the weakness of their capricious minds are all compelling reasons to exclude this sex from the sciences. which necessitate the solidity of judgment, which has always been found to be lacking in the writings of the most endowed women, for what judgment is an action of the understanding that reflects on her knowledge, and this reflection is dependent on a dry temperature, which is in contrast to the woman's brain, whose animal spirits are obscured by the clouds of humidity, which she meets well sometimes in the first point of the mind, but not in its second thoughts, which are always weaker than the first, mark: very flush with impotence: unlike men, whose second thoughts predominate over their first: why are they impetuous in their desires and violent in their first passions, in which they ordinarily have no measure or mediocrity? This is why women always hate or love; there is no in-between.

The 3 says, since the more a thing is imperfect, the more it needs to be perfected: Even if women's minds were weak and imperfect, as they are led to believe, it would follow that they would have a greater need for the sciences to cover up their flaws. And if our first mother had been wise, she would not have been deceived by the devil's beautiful promises, who, judging well that Adam, wise as he was, had discovered his subtleties, took great care not to take him, but to a poor stupid and ignorant woman. Therefore, it is unfair to want women to be more perfect and wise than men while still denying them the means to achieve these goals. Because if they don't know what virtue is, how can they be virtuous? Which being a habit of the will that is of blind faith, it is impossible for them to accomplish this if it is not illuminated by the lights of the understanding which acquire through knowledge and the sciences. And those who believe that the knowledge of natural things cannot counteract the modesty and honesty of this sex are unaware that knowledge of both good and bad things is always honorable and praiseworthy, and that it does not impair understanding any more than the Sun does when it shines on trash and cesspools. Because the understanding is independent of the will, which derives its goodness or malice from the things it is directed at, it is able to recognize even the most abhorrent and impure things without being tainted.

Since knowledge depends on chastity and simplicity, which leads theologians to assert that angels and separate intelligences are more knowledgeable than men, it would appear that the most certain method for women to maintain their chastity and purity, their only treasure is to stock up on science and knowledge.

Therefore, it has never happened before that a woman was educated who was not virginal and modest: what the nine virginal Muses were meant to represent, along with the Minerva Goddess of the Sciences, in ancient times.