Pretiosa margarita novella de thesauro, ac pretiosissimo philosophorum lapide : artis huius divinae typus, et methodus: collectanea ex Arnaldo, Rhaymundo, Rhasi, Alberto, et Michaele Scoto

JANUS LACINIUS CALABER PSYCHRONEUS, MINORITE,

GREETINGS TO THE READER.

Since, as the philosopher testifies, the discipline of opposites is the same,
and they shine more brightly when placed next to one another, I argue that the virtue of liberality is not so much praiseworthy and desirable, as the crime of avarice is shameful and execrable. This can be easily perceived from the following: for just as we consider those most worthy of every praise who do not consider themselves born for their own sake, but rather for their country and all their friends, and who contribute not only all their care and industry, but even their entire wealth to the public utility of good men, so too those who, because of a certain insolence and immoderate greed for possessing, are meanwhile unmindful of all justice and humanity, and, having hidden away their treasures, study only themselves and pursue only their own affairs—they are so inhuman and monstrous and like harpies that they rightly deserve to incur the marks of infamy and come into the conversation and censure of all men. And these same people, who are so submerged in either part of their wealth or in their discovered riches that they not only do not share them with those they should most benefit, but, being very much like buffoons, are never sufficiently useful even to themselves. Whence we judge that this execrable vice, the more it is against the nature of the good and the society of the human race, the more strongly we believe that liberality is best. Thus it happened that when I returned to Padua from Cisalpine Gaul, that most brilliant inquiry of the most learned Bonus of Ferrara, regarding the possibility and truth of alchemy, presented itself to me.