Echo of the God-Enlightened Fraternity of the Order of the Rosy Cross

Brotherhood of the R. C.

...only original Latin: "solum." This completes the sentence from the previous page. [an error] of the first concoction is not corrected in the second, much less in the third concoction. original Latin: "primæ concoctionis... in secundâ... tertiâ concoctione." In early modern medicine and alchemy, "concoction" referred to the "digestion" or purification of substances. The author uses this as a metaphor: a fundamental error in the early stages of thought or perception cannot be fixed by later refinement. They find at last: That reason indicates one thing, and experience another. original Latin: "Quod aliud ratio aliud experientiâ indicet."

And although the mind has certain fixed rules implanted by nature, so that it can make a beginning of knowing—which are called principles born with us Common notions original Latin: "principia nobiscum nata" and "Communes notiones." These refer to "innate ideas"—concepts like logic and basic math that 17th-century philosophers believed humans were born with.—among which the highest and first in all knowledge is: That a thing, at one and the same time original Latin: "simul & semel" in which it is something or some thing, cannot be nothing or no thing. Likewise, that the whole is greater than its part, that two is more than one, etc. Yet beyond this, this infallible rule is certain: Except for divine revelation and the reflective intellect: Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses. original Latin: "Excepta revelatione divinâ & intellectu reflexo: Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu." This is a cornerstone of empirical philosophy, suggesting that humans can only know what they have experienced through their five senses, unless God reveals it directly.

Therefore, it is certain that the knowledge of our own reason Reason|Original German: "Vernunfft"; the human capacity for logical thought and rational understanding. is now only piece-work and patchwork. And what we cannot attain through reason, [we must reach] with faith, as