would do so if they knew that I could speak English, or if they had more confidence in their own Latin, or if they had not such a high opinion of me.”
This shyness on the part of callers gave him plenty of time to talk over plans with his friends. He had not arrived at a fortunate moment; the king had gone to Scotland, Parliament had risen for three months, and nothing remained but to stay in London for the winter and unfold to Hartlib and his circle[1] the sketch, such as it was, of his Pansophic system. His leisure time he employed in the composition of a new work, entitled Via Lucis,[2] which was, however, not published until the year 1668 in Amsterdam.
Uppermost in the minds of Hartlib and his friends was the formation of a Universal College for physical research, on the lines suggested by Bacon in the New Atlantis. Now at last in Comenius they thought they had discovered a man competent to found a “Solomon’s House,” if only sufficient assistance were given him by Parliament. This was their chief object in urging him to come to England, and it was on the establishment of the college that the conversation turned. As we have seen, Comenius was totally unfitted to organise a collection of laboratories for physical research—for that was what the proposal practically amounted to. He was, as he himself confesses, primarily a theologian, and, though he could talk glibly and attractively of enlarging the boundaries of human knowledge, he had no conception of the tedious processes of experimentation that were necessary, and flew off to vague generalisations at every opportunity. If proof was necessary, he supplied it from the Scriptures, and as a means for verification valued a text from Genesis more than all the paraphernalia of the chemist and the physicist.
The Via Lucis, while much of it is of that fantastic
