4
The occasion appears to be propitious for the success of such an institution. This is not an era which will tolerate the division of acroatic[1] and exoteric learning, or recognise barriers within which the uninitiated are not permitted to encroach. Men are no longer content that the search for knowledge should be delegated to the exclusive charge of any particular body, involved in the frivolous niceties of alchemical empiricism, clouding in allegory, or shrouding in mystic symbols the steps by which they, as they supposed, approached the secrets of the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, or the universal solvent; no longer amused with the acuminated subtleties of metaphysical disquisitions, dogmatic theology, or philological dissertations. Theories are not now dozed over for a life time to pass away as idle dreams. We live in an age in which the difficulties which arrested the profoundest masters of antiquity—and drew forth desponding lamentations of the impossibility of their solution, or ambiguous prophecies[2] of the probability of their removal, have been subjugated by the ever strengthening arm of science; in which tangible realities and practical demonstration, from what order soever they emanate, are accepted and appreciated, and in which each one who can add to the treasury and enrich it with a new idea, or shed a ray of light upon any of the obscu-
- ↑ Aristotle classified his lectures as,—1st acroamatic, acroatic, or esoteric; 2nd, exoteric. The latter, delivered in public, comprised logic, rhetoric, politics and economics, &c. The former to which his select disciples alone were admitted, related to the Deity, being nature, &c.
- ↑ Note— Vide Bacon, especially Nova Atlantis, Magnalin Naturæ. One of the least oracular and most poetical of these is that well-known passage from Dr. Darwin:—
"Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car:
Or on wide waving wings expanded bear
The flying chariot through the fields of air.
Fair crews triumphant leaning from above
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move;
Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd
And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud."
