The way to it is, for the most part, horrible &
fearful, the dangers none worse, to them that are _destinati filii_:
sometimes I am travelling that way.... I think I have spoken with some
that have been there."
Howes writes very cautiously: "Dear friend, I desire with all my heart
that I might write plainer to you, but in discovering the mystery, I may
diminish its majesty & give occasion to the profane to abuse it, if it
should fall into unworthy hands." By and by he begins to think his first
doctor a humbug, but he finds a better. Howes was evidently a man of
imaginative temper, fit to be captivated by the alchemistic theory of the
unity of composition in nature, which was so attractive to Goethe.
Perhaps the great poet was himself led to it by his Rosicrucian studies
when writing the first part of Faust. Howes tells his friend that "there
is all good to be found in unity, & all evil in duality & multiplicity.
_Phoenix illa admiranda sola semper existit_, therefore while a man & she
is two, he shall never see her,"--a truth of very wide application, and
too often lost sight of or never seen at all. "The Arabian Philos. I writ
to you of, he was styled among us Dr Lyon, the best of all the
Rosicrucians[143] that ever I met withal, far beyond Dr Ewer: they that
are of his strain are knowing men; they pretend [i.
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