Hands on

The Hoovers comment in their preface that Agricola was following on the work of Aristotle on one hand, and the Alchemists on the other. According to them, Agricola departed from his predecessors in the value he placed on observation over speculation.

In my mind, speculation is something we do with our imagination - or it may be something we do when we allow someone else, an "expert", to interpret reality for us. The Alchemists engaged in speculation when they aimed to convert lead into gold, or create the elixir of life. Their expectations might have caused feelings of disappointment or failure, or even blinded them to valuable observations they were making. Even so, they learned a lot along the way.

Some of us at church watched a movie last night called The Man Without a Face. Part of this movie had to do with a grade-school boy struggling to pass an entrance exam for a selective private high school. He went to a tutor asking him for help with Latin exercises. The help he got was that the tutor ordered him to dig a hole three feet across and three feet deep. He dug a lot of these holes of different shapes, and only much later was asked to apply this experience to compute the volume of the holes. This teaching helped the boy pass the exam, where others had failed.

Agricola is writing and the Hoovers are translating from that kind of hands-on experience, and that is a good reason to respect them as writers, because they have dug a lot of holes before attempting to write about it.