Page 17 - Book of Crates

and spiritual man; as for the other, I did not know his name. They had
discussed between them on a question.

The spiritual one had told the other: “Are you able to know your
soul in a complete manner? If you knew it as it is appropriate, and if
you knew what can make it better, you would be able to recognise that
the names that the philosophers gave to it once are not its real names.”

When I had read these words in the volume, I hit my hands one
against the other and exclaimed: “Oh doubtful names that look like the
real names, what errors and anguishes you cause among men!”

Then it seemed to me that an angel answered to me: “You are
right; such was the work of the philosophers, and that is what they put
in their books; because one called it the Magnesia; another, in his
book, named it the great Electrum; a third gave it the name of the great
Androdamas; a fourth, Harchqal; a fifth, the stone of the iron water; a
sixth, the stone more precious than the water of gold.”

Finally no philosopher wanted to accept the denomination which
had been used by his predecessor to indicate the operation.
Undoubtedly the thing was the same, the ways and means were
identical; but the divergence was in the name. Each of those that had
arrived at the heights of the science claimed to formulate a
denomination of origin different of the one of his competitors, and it is
for this reason that confusion increased. One acted in the same way for
the operation, the colours and the weights. They disturbed all those
who, after them, followed their doctrines and led them into doubt; so
that most denied that it was a true thing.

I asked this character then for the reason which had corrupted
people thus and had led them into error. He answered me, “You have
the volume before you, read it and you will find everything that I taught
to you there.”

I read the treatise then on the water of sulphur. I believed, without
the slightest doubt, that I understood the sense of what I read. “Do you
think”, I said to him, “that all is that obvious?”

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