bear upon the obscurities of these documents, that very light in which
we are told, we must unroll them; for they come to us, as the
interpreter takes pains to tell us, with an 'infolded' science in
them. That light of '_times_,' that knowledge of the conditions under
which these works were published, which is essential to the true
interpretation of them, thanks to our contemporary historians, is
already in our hands. What we need now is to explore the secrets of
this philosophy with it,--necessarily secrets at the time it was
issued--what we need now is to open these books of a new learning in
it, and read them by it.

In that part of the work above referred to, from which some extracts
are subjoined for the purpose of introducing intelligibly the
demonstration contained in this volume, it was the position of the
Elizabethan Men of Letters that was exhibited, and the conditions
which prescribed to the founders of a new school in philosophy, which
was none other than the philosophy of practice, the form of their
works and the concealment of their connection with them--conditions
which made the secret of an Association of 'Naturalists' applying
science in that age to the noblest subjects of speculative inquiry,
and to the highest departments of practice, a life and death secret.
The _physical_ impossibility of publishing at that time, anything
openly relating to the questions in which the weal of men is most
concerned, and which are the primary questions of the science of man's
relief, the opposition which stood at that time prepared to crush any
enterprise proposing openly for its end, the common interests of man
as man, is the point which it was the object of that part of the work
to exhibit. It was presented, not in the form of general statement
merely, but in those memorable particulars which the falsified,
suppressed, garbled history of the great founder of this school