You cannot serve some without injuring others; you cannot protect the good without warring on the bad; and if you desire to reform the faulty, why, you must lower yourself to live with the faulty to know their faults.
Even so saith Paracelsus, a great man, though often wrong.

('It is as necessary to know evil things as good; for who can know what is good without the knowing what is evil ?' etc .-- Paracelsus, 'De Nat.

Rer.,' lib.

3.) Not mine this folly; I live but in knowledge,--I have no life in mankind!" Another time Glyndon questioned the mystic as to the nature of that union or fraternity to which Zanoni had once referred.
"I am right, I suppose," said he, "in conjecturing that you and himself profess to be the brothers of the Rosy Cross ?" "Do you imagine," answered Mejnour, "that there were no mystic and solemn unions of men seeking the same end through the same means before the Arabians of Damus, in 1378, taught to a wandering German the secrets which founded the Institution of the Rosicrucians?
I allow, however, that the Rosicrucians formed a sect descended from the greater and earlier school.

They were wiser than the Alchemists,--their masters are wiser than they." "And of this early and primary order how many still exist ?" "Zanoni and myself." "What, two only!--and you profess the power to teach to all the secret that baffles Death ?" "Your ancestor attained that secret; he died rather than survive the only thing he loved.