Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/870

852 delivered in the university or academy of Berlin, or on public occasions. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth contain his contributions to the Transactions of the Berlin Academy, and the seventh contains his critiques. The first two are valuable among other excellences from an educational point of view, and contain an exposition of many sound educa tional principles. In them Boeckh shows himself a man of wide heart, interested in the most diverse forms of investigation, an ardent patriot, and a lover of justice and truth.  BOEHME, (1575-1624), a mystical writer, whose surname (of which Fechner gives eight German varieties) appears in English literature as Beem, Behmont, tfec., and notably in the form, was born at Alt- Seidenberg, in Upper Lusatia, a straggling hamlet among the hills, some ten miles S.E. of Gorlitz. He came of a well-to-do family, but his first employment was that of herd boy on the Landskrone, a hill in the neighbour hood of Gorhtz, and the only education he received was at the town-school of Seidenberg, a mile from his home. Seidenberg, to this day, is filled with shoemakers, and to a shoemaker Jakob was apprenticed in his fourteenth year (1589), being judged not robust enough for hus bandry. Ten years later (1599) we find him settled at Gorlitz as master-shoemaker, and married to Katharina, daughter of Hans Kuntzschmann, a thriving butcher in the town. After industriously pursuing his vocation for ten years, he bought (1610) the substantial house, which still preserves his name, close by the bridge, in the Neiss- Vorstadt. Two or three years later he gave up business, and did not resume it as a shoemaker ; but for some years before his death he made and sold woollen gloves, regularly visiting Prague fair for this purpose. Boehtne s authorship began in his 37th year (1612) with a treatise, Morgen jRothe im Au/tjang, which though un finished was surreptitiously copied, and eagerly circulated in MS. by Karl von Encler. This raised him at once out of his homely sphere, and made him the centre of a local circle of liberal thinkers, considerably above him in station and culture. The charge of heresy was, however, soon directed against him by Gregorius Richter, then pastor primarius of Gorlitz. Feeling ran so high after .Richter s pulpit denunciations, that, in July 1613, the municipal council, fearing a disturbance of the peace, made a show of examining Boehme, took possession of his fragmentary quarto, and dismissed the writer with an admonition to meddle no more with such matters. For five years he obeyed this injunction. But in 1618 bsgan a second period of authorship ; he poured forth, but did not publish, treatise after treatise, expository and polemical, in the next and the two following years. In 1622 he composed nothing but a few short pieces on true repentance, resignation, &c., which, however, devotionally speaking, are the most precious of all his writings. They were the only pieces offered to the public in his lifetime and with his permission, a fact which is evidence of the essentially religious and practical char acter of his mind. Their publication at Gorlitz, on New Year s Day 1624, under the title of Der Weg zu Christo, was the signal for renewed clerical hostility. Boehme had by this time entered on the third and most prolific though the shortest period (1623-4) of his speculation. His labours at the desk were interrupted in May 1624 by a summons to Dresden, where his famous &quot; colloquy &quot; with the Upper Consistorial Court was made the occasion of a flattering but transient ovation on the part of a new circle of admirers. Richter died in August 1624, and Boehme did not long survive his pertinacious foe. Seized with a fever when away from home, he was with difficulty con veyed to Gorlitz. His wife was at Dresden on business ; and during the first week of his malady he was nursed by a literary friend. He died, after receiving the rites of the church, grudgingly administered by the authorities, on Sun day, 17th November. Clerical ill-will followed him to the grave, and the malice of the vulgar defaced his monument. Boehme always professed that a direct inward opening or illumination was the only source of his speculative power. He pretended to no other revelation. Ecstatic raptures we should not expect, for he was essentially a Protestant mystic. No &quot; thus saith the Lord &quot; was claimed as his warrant, after the manner of Antoinette Bourignon, or Ludowick Muggleton ; no spirits or angels held con verse with him as with Swedeoborg. It is needless to dwell, in the way either of acceptance or rejection, on the very few occasions in which his outward life seemed to him to come into contact with the invisible world. The appari tion of the pail of gold to the herd boy on the Landskrone, the visit of the mysterious stranger to the young apprentice, the fascination of the luminous sheen, reflected from a common pewter dish, which first, in 1600, gave an intuitive turn to his meditations, the heavenly music which filled his ears as he lay dying none of these matters are con nected organically with the secret of his special power. The mysteries of which he discoursed were not reported to him : he &quot; beheld&quot; them. He saw the root of all mysteries, the Ungrund or Urgrund, whence issue all contrasts and discordant principles, hardness and softness, severity and mildness, sweet and bitter, love and sorrow, heaven and hell. These he &quot;saw&quot; in their origin; these he attempted to describe in their issue, and to reconcile in their eternal result. He saw into the being of God ; whence the birth or going forth of the divine manifestation. Nature lay unveiled to him, he was at home in the heart of things. His own book, which he himself was,&quot; the microcosm of man, with his threefold life, was patent to his vision. Such was his own account of his qualification. If he failed it was in expression ; he confessed himself a poor mouthpiece, though he saw with a sure spiritual eye. It must not be supposed that the form in which Boehme s pneumatic realism worked itself out in detail was shaped entirely from within. In his writings we trace the influence of Theophr. Bombast von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus (1493-1541), of Kaspar Schweukfeld (1490- 1561), the first Protestant mystic, and of Valentin Weigel (1533-1588). From the school of Paracelsus came much of his puzzling phraseology, his Turla and Tinctur and so forth, a phraseology embarrassing to himself as well as to his readers. His friends plied him with foreign terms, which he was delighted to receive, interpreting them by an instinct, and using them often in a corrupted form and always in a sense of his own. Thus the word Idea called up before him the image of &quot; a very fair, heavenly, and chaste virgin.&quot; The title Aurora, by which his earliest treatise is best known, was furnished by Dr Balthasar Walther. These, however, were false helps, which only serve to obscure a difficult study, like the Flagrat and Lubet, with which his English translator veiled Boehme s own honest Schreck and Lust. There is danger lest his crude science and his crude philosophical vocabulary con ceal the fertility of Boehme s ideas and the transcendent greatness of his religious insight. Few will take the pains to follow him through the interminable account of his seven Quellgeister, which remind us of Gnosticism ; or even of his three first properties of eternal nature, in which his disciples find Newton s formula; anticipated, and which certainly bear a marvellous resemblance to the three apx at/ of Schelling s Theogonische Natur. Boehme is always greatest when he breaks away from his fancies and his trammels, and allows speech to the voice of his heart. Then he is artless, clear, and strong; and no man can help listening to him, whether he dive deep down with the

