'The great secret of the Elizabethan Age was inextricably reserved by
the founders of a new learning, the prophetic and more nobly gifted
minds of a new and nobler race of men, for a research that should test
the mind of the discoverer, and frame and subordinate it to that so
sleepless and indomitable purpose of the prophetic aspiration. It was
"the device" by which they undertook to live again in the ages in
which their achievements and triumphs were forecast, and to come forth
and rule again, not in one mind, not in the few, not in the many, but
in all. "For there is no throne like that throne in the thoughts of
men," which the ambition of these men climbed and compassed.
'The principal works of the Elizabethan Philosophy, those in which the
new method of learning was practically applied to the noblest
subjects, were presented to the world in the form of AN ENIGMA. It was
a form well fitted to divert inquiry, and baffle even the research of
the scholar for a time; but one calculated to provoke the philosophic
curiosity, and one which would inevitably command a research that
could end only with the true solution. That solution was reserved for
one who would recognise, at last, in the disguise of the great
impersonal teacher, the disguise of a new learning. It waited for the
reader who would observe, at last, those thick-strewn scientific
clues, those thick-crowding enigmas, those perpetual beckonings from
the "theatre" into the judicial palace of the mind. It was reserved
for the student who would recognise, at last, the mind that was
seeking so perseveringly to whisper its tale of outrage, and "the
secrets it was forbid." It waited for one who would answer, at last,
that philosophic challenge, and say, "Go on, I'll follow thee!" It was
reserved for one who would count years as days, for the love of the
truth it hid; who would never turn back on the long road of
initiation, though all "THE IDOLS" must be left behind in its stages;
who would never stop until it stopped in that new cave of Apollo,
where the handwriting on the wall spells anew the old Delphic motto,
and publishes the word that "_unties_ the spell."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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