Aula Lucis, or The House of Light

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...and did not see. To accomplish this, they did not proceed as some modern barbarians do by loud and malicious disputes; instead, a calm instruction was offered. Once that instruction was rejected, it was never urged again. They walked in a path so different and remote from that of the schoolmen original: "school-men." Scholastic philosophers of the medieval period, whom Vaughan and his contemporaries often criticized for focusing on abstract logic rather than physical experimentation.; and truly, they were right to do so. For once their principles were resisted, they could inflict no greater punishment on their adversaries than to conceal those principles from them.

Had their doctrine been like what the universities profess now, their silence would indeed have been a virtue. However, their positions were not mere noise and abstract notions; they were mostly deep experimental secrets of infinite use and benefit. Such a tradition as theirs may wear the title given by the noble Verulam Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (Lord Verulam), a statesman and philosopher whose "New Organon" championed the empirical scientific method., and is most justly called the tradition of the lamp original: "traditio Lampadis." A concept from Francis Bacon referring to the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next, like a torch or lamp being handed off..

But I observe that in their delivery of mysteries, they have (as in all other things) imitated nature, who does not dispense her light without her shadows. They have provided a veil for their art, not so much for the sake of obscurity as for ornament; and yet I cannot deny but—