Moonchild

14 Chapter AN INFORMATIVE DISCOURSE UPON THE OCCULT CHARACTER OF THE MOON, HER THREEFOLD NATURE, HER FOURFOLD PHASES, AND HER EIGHT-AND-TWENTY MANSIONS; WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE EVENTS THAT PRECEDED THE CLIMAX OF THE GREAT EXPERIMENT, BUT ESPECIALLY OF THE VISION OF ILIEL THE Ancients, whose wisdom is so much despised by those who have never studied it, but content themselves with a pretence of understanding modern science which deceives nobody, would have smiled to observe how often the "latest discoveries" are equivalent to some fancy of Aristotle, or some speculation of Heracleitus. The remoter Picay-universities of America, which teach farming or mining, with a little "useless" knowledge as a side-course, for show, are full of bumptious little professors who would not be allowed to sweep out a laboratory in London or Berlin. The ambition of such persons is to obtain an illustrated interview in a Sunday supplement, with a full account of their wonderful discoveries, which have revolutionized the art of sucking eggs. They are peculiarly severe upon back numbers like Charles Darwin. Their ignorance leads them to believe the bombast of democracy-flatterers, who scream weekly of Progress, and it really appears to them that anything more than six months old is out-of-date. They do not know that this is only true of loud-shouted mushroom rubbish such as they call truth. [185] The fundamental difference between ancient and modern science is not at all in the field of theory. Sir William Thomson was just as metaphysical as Pythagoras or Raymond Lully, and Lucretius quite as materialistic as Ernst