Simonides Redivivus, or the Art of Memory and Oblivion

At the foot of Law. In the Idea of Medicine, chap. 15.

nevertheless, so that pearls may not be cast before swine, and all secrets may not become most manifest and trivial to everyone, he will philosophically take care. Sacred things, Hippocrates says, are shown to sacred men; it is not right for the profane to see them before they are initiated into the mysteries of the science. Nor do I think that just anyone, with Petrus Severinus, should be admitted to the baths of Diana, nor that the virginity preserved from the beginning of the ages should be rashly profaned. The door is opened wide to you, most distinguished youths, in the renowned Mauritian referring to the University of Marburg, founded by Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Kassel, and an expedited opportunity is offered to explore the mysteries of nature, which certainly has not yet been opened to anyone in Italy, nor in France, nor in other academic or more remote places. Enter, therefore, and bring with you modesty, submission, confession of ignorance, and an ingenuous desire to learn (for these were what the Ancients required of disciples), and pursue with immense gratitude the liberality of the most praised Prince and the dexterity of Hartmann. To whom even Galen himself, if he were to revive, would approach for the sake of learning, to marvel at and kiss so many and such great hidden things of nature, unearthed by posterity; to exult at such a great increase in Medicine; and finally to refute with the weightiest words that license of his slaves for cursing. But I return to where I digressed.

There is, therefore, another class of those men who, convinced by experience and examples, indeed concede that there are still many things in the nature of things not explained or known by the ancients, but discovered and to be discovered only by this century; but because they lack the occasion for learning new and better things, or are indignant that the given precepts must still be elucidated by their own sweat, and can with the greatest difficulty suffer others to be superior and more learned, they therefore prohibit and hinder others who are willing to leave nothing unattempted and to learn, and they induce and inflame the minds of mortals with subtle speech to accuse the arts and the artists, and they want nothing to be right except what they themselves know or have done.