Physiologia Kircheriana Experimentalis

The other, Blauenstein, like an unbridled horse unaccustomed to the liberty he had claimed for himself, lashed out at the author with mere heaps of calumnies and reproaches; and, lest he be caught, published his apology under a fictitious name, from which, however, nothing shines forth but his asininity and ignorance. Since he does not support his reasoning with a single valid argument, he is held in derision by all; and where he now dwells is passed over in silence out of shame, to spare his reputation. And thus, each of them, wishing to diminish the integrity and authority of a venerable man, in whose excellence the judgments of the whole world have already contended, accomplished nothing other than what was once handed down to memory regarding that Athenian envious of the virtue of Miltiades: who, while he strove to shatter with a hammer the statues of that great man and to demolish those signs of immortality, was crushed by the falling of the same statue and shattered by the penalties of a deserved death. They challenged the man to the arena with, as it were, dialectical barbs, but just as the prudence of the great Kircher eludes these sterile thistles, so too does he crush them with silence.

Nor are there lacking countless others who, although they are not ignorant of the fatal catastrophe of these and infinite others, are nonetheless led by their examples; trapped by a certain wandering of a lascivious wit—as if in the labyrinths of error—and held by a common sort of cupidity, they fluctuate persistently, sweating over that work out of a desire for avaricious gain, to which the accursed hunger for gold and the futile hope of philosophers is wont to vehemently entice the mystagogues of fallen nature, while the outcome of the matter has clearly proven that one and all have lost their oil and labor in these vain endeavors, and have directed their journey toward that goal in vain. I have indeed been stunned again and again at the most vain boasting of certain wits—with whom I have had dealings, not without my own loss—who, while they boasted that they had unraveled the Gordian knot, reached the Colchian shore, and grasped that "blessed" stone, as they call it, sometimes through receivers, sometimes through the most abstruse investigations, were rather imitating the triumphs of Domitian in catching flies, and by achieving nothing, were expressing the labors of Tantalus and Ixion, while they receded far, very far from the path of a perfect work, achieving nothing else but that they devoured their own wealth and that of others; indeed, some, by suspending the hope of many upon the outcome of the matter, easily experienced a suspension themselves. I remain silent about the fact that I have perceived many men, otherwise distinguished and most famous for the perspicacity of their intellect and their skill in letters, to have been plunged into delusions, fantastic speculations, the most exotic ventures, and indeed the impotence of their own minds by examining this chimerical stone and by sailing across an immense sea of cupidity to seize this prefigured golden fleece.

Awaken, therefore, as if from a long lethargy, all of you who have pledged your names and strengths to this militia of Argonauts or pseudosophists. And let there be for you in this matter, besides other philosophers of sound mind, the great Apollo, the Mundus subterraneus of the great Kircher, whose true and sincere erudition may dig out your souls, lurking in subterranean shadows, into the light of truth; since from this most upright oracle, it may be salutarily made known that we can forge gold with the same hope and reason by which winds can be restrained while flying to and fro on ships.

Open, I say, your eyes to the light of such great wisdom, and by that very light accept it as established: that nature has sequestered these arcana from human cognition, so that we might understand that the Creator of all things has imposed the supreme hand of His omnipotence upon all created things, so that human curiosity might be forced to halt where it is not granted to the frailty of mortals to progress further. An enormous audacity is implanted in our nature, so that, bolstered by its vanity, it dares to enter upon Icarus-like paths; but the degenerate sons of nature rise to such a degree of temerity that they measure the height of their own minds with immense arrogance, destined to repeat heavier falls after they have imitated those youthful ardors of Phaethon, who, while he thought he could govern the light, rushed rashly toward the destruction of a headlong ruin. Yet it is clearly inaccessible to reason to attack with open light that which nature alone, within its own sphere of activity, fashions and works through this peculiar duty given to it by God in the most abstruse and, to our sight, most remote recesses.

Spare me in the meantime, you credulous students of Hermetic doctrine, if what I have written here—out of a candid spirit, and one capable of no passion or voluntary offense—does not please your palate; for our extinguishable confusion, provide the experience or the effect of this work so long debated and never elucidated, just as we provide to you these solid, truthful, and everywhere most proven experiments in the sight of the whole world, which the meager pen of my intellect has stitched together and brought into this order at the urging of my own thaumaturge, Father Athanasius Kircher; since it is not in the capacity of everyone to purchase collectively all and singular works of the author, of which forty exist, much less to read through them with attentive and studious application. Receive, therefore, benevolent reader, this labor of ours, such as it is, with a grateful and favorable spirit, and use it for your utility and delight, and for our everlasting memory. Farewell and favor me.