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CHAPTER XI.
ROSICRUCIAN APOLOGISTS: ROBERT FLUDD.
THE central figure of Eosicrucian literature, towering as an
intellectual giant above the crowd of souffleurs, theosophists,
and charlatanic professors of the magnum opus, who,
directly or otherwise, were connected with the mysterious
Brotherhood, is Robertus de Fluctibus, the great English
mystical philosopher of the seventeenth century, a man of
immense erudition, of exalted mind, and, to judge by his
writings, of extreme personal sanctity. Ennemoser de-
scribes him as one of the most distinguished disciples of
Paracelsus, but refuses to number him with " those conse-
crated theosophists who draw all wisdom from the fountain
of eternal light." He does not state his reasons for this
depreciatory judgment, and the brief and inadequate notice
which he gives of Fludd's system displays such a cursory
acquaintance with the works in which it is developed, that
it is doubtful whether he had taken pains to understand his
author. I should rank the Kentish mystic second to none
among the disciples of the " divine "
Theophrastus, while
in the profundity and extent of his learning, there can be
no question that he far surpassed his master, who is said to
have known little but to have divined almost everything,
and who is, therefore, called divinus, in the narrower sense
of that now much abused term.