Arcanity

Whatever physician has not this element of fire in its arcanity—if I may coin that word—cannot boast that he is a true and tried physician.

Arcanity, if there is such a noun, is not a deliberate concealment.

Length, arcanity and just plain dullness of some of the festival fare of foreign films certainly provide some cerebral exercise for audiences.

If thou’rt puzzled, go anywhere, / Seek priests or prophets, doctors for the brain, / I venture none of them can e’er explain / This love’s arcanity: like holy God / That’s three in one, ’t is more than something odd.

As moderns, we have a highly developed sense of the futility, even more, of the immorality of any effort to rehabilitate the pre-Enlightenment outlook. We cannot but reject at heart its capricous mysticism, its violence, its arcanity. Our sympathy with science is thus well-founded in a belief in our humanity and it is this which discourages us from embarking upon any serious revolt.

Here, purged of much of its arcanity and rendered in a native tradition of muckraking or investigative journalism, is the critique of Marcuse’s work in the 1960s.

But this Greek word for a scientific instrument reverberates with education and arcanity.

By this it is meant that the activities of courts are less widely reported than those of legislatures and the general, universalist language of law assuages the ideological and practical implications of legal decisions, whilst its arcanity obfuscates what is at stake.