chivalric and religious orders – outside Europe – could experience transnational similarity and unity when encountering the significant“ oriental” Other. It is on foreign soil they can truly develop their visions. Although Ramsay does not mention anything about a legal frame, keeping the inhabitants of the world republic together, we can assume that for him, a universal concept of human rights exists, based upon the idea of the true state of nature.
In a sense, Ramsay defends the universal right of each nation to maintain its diversity, and he thus represents“ cultural cosmopolitanism”. Although languages, geography, clothes and customs do not essentially differentiate people, they still are separate families. They represent different kingdoms, and they have duties that are a result of the demands of those states. The“ new people” are thus not created as a totally new design of mankind but instead by a joint imagination, the universal“ spiritual nation” serving as the ideological roof of a compartmentalised building where different families can live together in harmony without being forced to relinquish all the differences between them( compare this with last Soviet president Gorbatjov’ s vision of the“ joint European house” in 1987). In his oration, Ramsay does not mention the necessity of free trade between people( Kleingeld brands these interests“ Economical cosmopolitanism”). However, he adds a distinct trait to his ideas on universality by emphasising the importance of the free transfer of knowledge. When he states that“ all nations might increase all knowledge” or in the original manuscript“ all nations may borrow sound knowledge”(“ toutes les nations peuvent puiser des connoissances solides”), he apparently refers to his encyclopaedic ideas of a“ universal dictionary of all liberal arts and useful science”(“ Dictionnaire universel de tous les arts liberaux, et de toutes sciences utiles”). And it is the bond of Science, along with that of Virtue that will cement the“ new people”. We might here identify a new category of cosmopolitanism, involving the idea that knowledge can be increased mutually, freely transferred and disseminated among mankind for the benefit of all( an idea that we find represented in the contemporary virtual project Wikipedia). Let us call it“ encyclopaedic cosmopolitanism”, a world citizenship based upon shared knowledge.
How did these cosmopolitan ideas become part of the values of a society that initiates its members in secret ceremonies and that is known for the vast use of secret symbols? How compatible are extroverted ideas of a world community with the introverted secrecy of a restricted group? To address this question, we need perhaps to look at the tradition of Western esotericism. It has often been assumed that irrational mysticism is incompatible with the project of rational modernisation and the Enlightenment, but it may also be the case that these two currents in Western thought are interdependant from each other. Does secrecy manifest itself in the rituals and symbols of freemasonry or does it perhaps mirror an approach to establish a universally comprehensible language? Alexander Roob writes about the puzzle pictures and linguistic riddles in alchemy and mysticism:
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