"Adepts" do not see any help for it. Were these invisible and unknown
profanes to interfere with--not to say openly contradict--the dicta of
the Royal Society, contempt and ridicule, followed by charges of crass
ignorance of the first elementary principles of modern science would be
their only reward; while those who would lend an ear to their
"vagaries," would be characterized immediately as types of the "mild
lunatics" of the age. Unless, indeed, the whole of that August body
should be initiated into the great Mysteries at once, and without any
further ado or the preliminary and usual preparations or training, the
F.R.S.'s could be miraculously endowed with the required sixth sense,
the Adepts fear the task would be profitless. The latter have given
quite enough, little though it may seem, for the purposes of a first
trial. The sequence of martyrs to the great universal truths has never
been once broken; and the long list of known and unknown sufferers,
headed with the name of Galileo, now closes with that of Zollner. Is the
world of science aware of the real cause of Zollner's premature death?
When the fourth dimension of space becomes a scientific reality like the
fourth state of matter, he may have a statue raised to him by grateful
posterity. But this will neither recall him to life, nor will it
obliterate the days and months of mental agony that harassed the soul of
this intuitional, far-seeing, modest genius, made even after his death
to receive the donkey's kick of misrepresentation and to be publicly
charged with lunacy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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