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Letter №20 p. 2

One must have the key to it and that key is a science per se. Rosencranz taught orally. Saint Germain recorded the good doctrines in figures and his only cyphered MS. remained with his staunch friend and patron the benevolent German Prince from whose house and in whose presence he made his last exit—Home. Failure, dead failure! Speaking of "figures" and "numbers" Eliphas addresses those who know something of the Pythagorean doctrines. Yes; some of them do sum up all philosophy and include all doctrines. Isaac Newton understood them well; but withheld his knowledge very prudently for his own reputation, and very unfortunately for the writers of Saturday Review and its contemporaries. You seem to admire it — I do not. However talented from the literary point of view, a paper which gives vent to such unprogressive and dogmatic ideas as the one I came across in it, lately, ought to lose caste among its more liberal confreres. Scientific men, it thinks — "do not make at all good observers" at exhibitions of modern magic, spiritism and other "nine days wonders." This is certainly not as it should be, it adds for, "knowing as well as they do the limits of the natural (?!!) they should begin by assuming that what they see, or what they think they see, cannot be done, and should next look for the fallacy" etc. etc. Circulation of the blood, electric telegraph, railway and steamer argument all over again. They know "the limits of the natural"!! Oh, century of conceit and mental obscuration! And we are invited to London among these academical rags whose predecessors persecuted Mesmer and branded St. Germain as an impostor! All is secret for them as yet in nature of man—they know but the skeleton and form;


Notes: 

Saturday Review was The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art was a London weekly newspaper established by A. J. B. Beresford Hope in 1855.

"His only cyphered MS." The French Library at Troyes has a ciphered MS. (No. 2400) attributed to Saint Germain, entitled "La Tres Sainte Trinosophie" (The Most Holy Trinosophia). Some attribute this MS. to Cagliostro.