That is the question which Comte's first master-work professes to answer.
Traill professes to hold the scales equally.
The good man is the perfectly rational or perfect self-consistent man; and that is a full account of virtue, though Kant professes to re-interpret it still further in a much more positive sense as implying the service of humanity.
The treatise was therefore written before the birth of Boetius, if it be not a forgery; but there is no reason to suppose that the treatise was not a genuine production of the time to which it professes to belong.
The Liber de compositione alchemiae, which professes to be by Morienus - perhaps the same as the Marianus who was the teacher of Khalid - was translated by Robertus Castrensis, who states that he finished the work in 1182, and speaks as if he were making a revelation - " Quid sit alchemia nondum cognovit vestra Latinitas."
