ABSTRACT
It is in this way that I propose to use ‘Rosicrucian’ and ‘Rosicrucians’ in this concluding chapter, as a historical label for a style of thinking such as we have met with in this book.
In the same lecture, I attempted to define the historical position of the Rosicrucian type of thinker, whom I placed midway between the
Renaissance and the first, or seventeenth century, phase of the so-called scientific revolution. I said that the Rosicrucian was one fully in the stream of the Renaissance Hermetic-Cabalist tradition, but distinguished from the earlier phases of the movement by his addition of alchemy to his interests. This did not alter the basic adherence of the Rosicrucian to the scheme of ‘occult philosophy’ as laid down by Cornelius Agrippa. I pointed to John Dee as a typically Rosicrucian thinker, with his combined alchemical and cabalist interests, and I suggested that traces of the Rosicrucian outlook could be detected in Francis Bacon and even in Isaac Newton.
