The Life of
Johnson 中兩次提到 John Campbell的書Hermippus Redivivus
第二次是
"I exclaimed to her, "I am now, intellectually, Hermippus redivivus, I am quite restored by him, by transfusion of mind." "There are many (she replied) who ..."
因為書中說該John Campbell(此人沒上"大英百科") 為一傳記/政治學家
所以突然冒出翻譯為"煉金術"等作品
百思不得其解
隔天我上網查才知道這Hermippus Redivivus 其實是 John Campbell翻譯之作
"The
Hermippus was a commercial success, mentioned by the
Journal des Scavans, and translated into English in 1743 by John Campbell (1708–75), a Scottish historian and political writer. Campbell's text was re-translated into French by Monsieur de la Place in 1789, and “it is this that is known and considered by many people as the work of the German physician”; some later readers even thought that Campbell had written the
Hermippus in its entirety.
12 Samuel Johnson said that it was a “very entertaining account of the hermetic philosophy and as furnishing a curious history of the extravagances of the human mind”.
13 ..."
13 James Boswell,
The life of Dr. Johnson, 2 vols, London, J M Dent and Sons, 1933, vol. 1, p. 258.
ANNA MARIE ROOS, PhD
*
Copyright © Anna Marie Roos 2007
Conclusion
From Cohausen's advice to bottle female breath, to marry young wives, as well as his admonition to schoolteachers not to smoke in the classroom, as they were denying themselves the volatile salts in the breath of their charges, it would be evident to most readers that they were in the midst of an effective satire which drew on medical theories of the day for a humorous end. To continue the joke, much in the manner of Thomas More's
Utopia, Cohausen used the satirical device of including a series of encomiums and letters praising the
Hermippus. One letter was from his friend Bishop Nünning, who had earlier critiqued Cohausen's work with his example of Solomon; another was from his eldest son, Bernard, also a physician of some note who published a work on the chyle; and there was a concluding “epigramma votivum” from Salentinus Ernest Eugenius Cohausen, the nephew of our author, doctor to the troops of the Elector Archbishop of Cologne, and active correspondent with scientific societies.
78
After this extensive display of learned praise, Cohausen could not maintain the pretence any longer, and finally admitted in the last few pages that the premise of the
Hermippus was a “lusus satyricus”, Hermippus himself a fictional character. Cohausen launched his career by penning a work that did not promise any secrets of immortality, and, ironically, he ended it in the same vein, no doubt disappointing his more gullible readers much as the work by Behrens had disappointed the members of the Bishop of Munster's court forty years earlier. Like Behrens, Cohausen proclaimed in a concluding verse that longevity was not to be found in the breath of girls or the philosophers' stone, but rather “Sed fato et Fortunae salutari, Causis plerumque eventuum occultis”: aging was due to the outcome of fortune, with unknown causes and outcomes.
79
In the
Helmontius ecstaticus, Cohausen praised van Helmont's hermetic vision of receiving the alkahest and the philosophers' stone, and in the
Decas, the physician proclaimed it was humanity's purpose to search for the lost tree of life. Now, at the end of his own life, in his conclusion to the
Hermippus, Cohausen continued his verse satire with a poem dedicated to the
Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, which alchemists claimed held the secret of the philosophers' stone and immortality.
80 Pictorial representations of the
Emerald tablet contained the Latin acrostic for the volatile salt vitriol, thought to be a possible source of the philosophers' stone: “visita interiora terrae rectificando invenies occultum lapidem”—“visit the interior of the earth, by rectifying you will find the hidden stone”. Cohausen's satirical reference to a volatile salt that supposedly held the secret of immortality could not be a more fitting end to his work. Newman has noted that “only around the beginning of the eighteenth century did transmutational alchemy come to be strictly segregated from chemistry, and even then there was overlap in some quarters.”
81 During his career, which ended in the early Enlightenment, Cohausen witnessed and demonstrated in the
Hermippus the gradual transformation of alchemical principles into chemical ones; what were formerly serious precepts became subjects for humour and derision. As John Campbell wrote in the preface to his version of the
Hermippus, “there is in this Dissertation, such a Mixture of serious Irony, as cannot but afford a very agreeable Entertainment to those who are proper Judges of Subjects of this Kind, and who are inclined to see how far the Strength of human Understanding can support philosophical Truths against common Notions, and vulgar Prejudices”.
82 We can only agree, for Cohausen's satire was worth its salt indeed.
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Hermippus Redivivus or the Sage's Triumph Over Old Age and the Grave
by
Edmund Goldsmid
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis:
Within this ancient and rare book written in 1744, a method is laid down for prolonging the life and vigor of man, including a commentary upon an ancient inscription, in which this great secret is revealed, supported by numerous authorities. The whole is interspersed with a great variety of remarkable and well attested relations.
引申指聚集在一起的人或事物。如：「花叢」、「草叢」、「人叢」、「論叢」。
目录
