Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1De Quincey, Thomas
Religion
Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays -- 19th century
many things heretofore unobserved, _because uncombined_, were
gathered into a unity of evidence to that ruin, spread through
innumerable channels, the great altitude would begin dimly to
reveal itself by means of the mighty depth in correspondence. One
deep calleth to another. One after one the powers lodged in the
awful succession of uncoverings would react upon each other; and
thus the feeblest language would be as capable of receiving and
reflecting the system of truths (because the system is an arch
that supports itself) as the richest and noblest; and for the same
reason that makes geometry careless of language. The vilest jargon
that ever was used by a shivering savage of Terra del Fuego is as
capable of dealing with the sublime and eternal affections of space
and quantity, with up and down, with more and less, with circle and
radius, angle and tangent, as is the golden language of Athens.] and
the story which illustrates it is this:--A great work of Apollonius,
the sublime geometer, was supposed in part to have perished: seven
of the eight books remained in the original Greek; but the eighth
was missing. The Greek, after much search, was not recovered; but
at length there was found (in the Bodleian, I think,) an Arabic
translation of it. An English mathematician, Halley, knowing not
one word of Arabic, determined (without waiting for that Arabic
key) to pick the lock of this MS. And he did so. Through strength
of preconception, derived equally from his knowledge of the general
subject, and from his knowledge of this particular work in its
earlier sections, using also to some extent the subtle art of the
decipherer, [Footnote: An art which, in the preceding century, had
been greatly improved by Wallis, Savilian professor of geometry at
Oxford, the improver of analytic mathematics, and the great historian
of algebra. Algebra it was that suggested to him his exquisite
deciphering skill, and the parliamentary war it was that furnished
him with a sufficient field of practice. The King's private cabinet
of papers, all written in cipher, and captured in the royal coach on
the decisive day of Naseby (June, 1645), was (I believe) deciphered
by Wallis, _proprio marte_.] now become so powerful an instrument
of analysis, he translated the whole Arabic MS. He printed it--he
published it. He tore--he extorted the truth from the darkness of
an unknown language--he would not suffer the Arabic to benefit by
its own obscurity to the injury of mathematics. And the book remains
a monument to this day, that a system of ideas, having internal
coherency and interdependency, is vainly hidden under an unknown
tongue; that it may be illuminated and restored chiefly through
their own reciprocal involutions. The same principle applies, and
_a fortiori_ applies, to religious truth, as one which lies
far deeper than geometry in the spirit of man, one to which the
inner attestation is profounder, and to which the key-notes of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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