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A projector and enthusiast, Comenius desired, like Bacon, an entirely new intellectual era. With Bacon's intellectual ambition, but without Bacon's capacity, Comenius proposed to revolutionise all knowledge, and to make complete wisdom accessible to all, in a brief space of time, and with a minimum of labour.
For years all patient students of Latin had writhed in agonies untold. They had learned long lists of Latin words, with their meanings; they had wrestled in their teens with gerunds, supines, ablative absolutes and distracting rules about the subjunctive mood, and they had tried in vain to take an interest in stately authors far above their understanding. Comenius reversed the whole process.
Impressed by such considerations, I threw my lectures almost entirely into biographical form, with here and there a few historical lectures to bind the whole together. Beginning with Erasmus, Luther, Ulrich von Hutten, and Charles V, I continued with Comenius, Canisius, Grotius, Thomasius, and others who, whether born on German soil or not, exercised their main influence in Germany.
This was what Comenius was thinking: he was meditating a sequel to his popular little book, to be called "Janua Rerum Reserata" or "Gate of Things Opened," and to contain an epitome or encyclopaedia of all essential knowledge, under the three heads of Nature, Scripture, and the Mind of Man.
It was the road, he said, to knowledge, to character, to fellowship with God, to eternal life. He divided the educational course into four stages the "mother school," the popular school, the Latin school and the University; and on each of these stages he had something original to say. For mothers Comenius wrote a book, entitled the "School of Infancy."
If Comenius had lived in the twentieth century, he would certainly have been disgusted and shocked by the modern demand for a purely secular education. He would have regarded the suggestion as an insult to human nature.
His castle in the air collapsed. At the very time when Comenius was resident in London this country was on the eve of a revolution. The Irish Rebellion broke out, the Civil War trod on its heels, and Comenius left England for ever. >From this moment his life was a series of bitter and cruel disappointments. What provision was made in that famous Peace for the poor exiled Brethren? Absolutely none.
What, after all, were the new notions propounded from Poland, with such universal European effort, by this Protestant Austro-Slav, Comenius, and sponsored in England by the Prussian Hartlib? We shall try to give them in epitome.
"Being thus asked," says Comenius, "by the most intimate of my friends, a man piously eager for the public good, to communicate some idea of my future work, I did communicate to him in writing, in a chance way, what I had a thought of prefixing some time or other to the work in the form of a Preface; and this, beyond my hope, and without my knowledge, was printed at Oxford, under the title of Conatuum Comenianorum Praeludia."
He deprives himself of light, of hand, and of regulation, who pushes away from him any shred of the knowable." From such passages one has a glimmer of what Comenius did mean by his Pansophia. He hoped to do something himself towards furnishing the world with this grand desideratum.
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