"Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery"
About this Quote
Machen is doing something sly here: he flatters the modern mind’s hunger for “human knowledge” while quietly yanking the floor out from under it. The sentence begins like a Victorian catalogue of progress - branches, tracing, sources, principles - the confident architecture of Enlightenment thinking. Then it ends with a magician’s reveal: the closer you get to foundations, the more the foundation dissolves. “Vanishes into mystery” isn’t a shrug; it’s a reversal. Inquiry doesn’t culminate in certainty, it culminates in fog.
That move is deeply Machen. As a writer linked to weird fiction and fin-de-siècle spiritual unease, he’s suspicious of the era’s faith that classification equals comprehension. The subtext is that rationalism is competent at mapping the middle of things - practical descriptions, useful models, social consensus - but oddly helpless when forced to answer the childish, unkillable questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is consciousness? What makes beauty hit like an event? By insisting on “final principles,” he targets the point where science turns philosophical and philosophy turns, inevitably, religious or mystical.
The intent isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-complacent. Machen isn’t telling you to stop thinking. He’s warning you that thinking, taken seriously, ends in humility. Mystery isn’t a failure state; it’s the honest remainder after the mind has done its best work. In a culture that treats explanation as a conquest, Machen recasts it as a pilgrimage with no terminal station.
That move is deeply Machen. As a writer linked to weird fiction and fin-de-siècle spiritual unease, he’s suspicious of the era’s faith that classification equals comprehension. The subtext is that rationalism is competent at mapping the middle of things - practical descriptions, useful models, social consensus - but oddly helpless when forced to answer the childish, unkillable questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is consciousness? What makes beauty hit like an event? By insisting on “final principles,” he targets the point where science turns philosophical and philosophy turns, inevitably, religious or mystical.
The intent isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-complacent. Machen isn’t telling you to stop thinking. He’s warning you that thinking, taken seriously, ends in humility. Mystery isn’t a failure state; it’s the honest remainder after the mind has done its best work. In a culture that treats explanation as a conquest, Machen recasts it as a pilgrimage with no terminal station.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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