Manuscripts for Friends of Secret Sciences

P r e f a c e .

decades Continuing from the previous page: "...the discoveries made since the last two decades." I cannot admire enough; when, where I seek the all-illuminating torch of the Enlightenment: The "Aufklärung," an 18th-century intellectual movement emphasizing reason over tradition. with all the strain of my senses, I often find only a wretched little night-lamp, by which even a prepared eye: Literally "armed eye" (gewapnetes Auge), referring to an observer using instruments or someone intellectually sharpened. must still grope about; when I see so many new inventions that are actually old, and so many old, venerable observations merely trimmed and curled up in a new, modern dandy’s outfit before me again—observations which were no longer new 100, 200, or even 1,000 or more years ago, but were nevertheless worthy of being commemorated with a few powerful words and passed on to posterity; When I disapprove, to a very high degree, that one permits oneself to mock the most venerable men of antiquity—to sneer at a Geber, Lullius, Holland, Basilius Valentinus, Bacon, Theophrastus, Agrippa, Trithemius, Scotus, Helmont, and Glauber, or Dippel This list includes famous alchemists, philosophers, and early scientists: Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber), Ramon Llull, Paracelsus (Theophrastus), and Jan Baptist van Helmont, among others.—just as one considers Becher, Stahl, Boyle, Hoffmann, Roth, Teichmeyer, Henkel, Boerhaave, Burghart, Pott, Justi, Haen, and so many others to be simpletons because they believed in Alchemy, Magic, and secret powers in nature, and because they had not yet discovered the discoveries of the moderns, and so forth; and when one then ascribes follies to them that are not in them, and judges them—