which may have, though not by necessity, the basic character of mystery. The essence of the latter has been foreign to man from the moment he "explained" the mysterious simply as the unexplained. The mystery thus becomes a "residue" still remaining to be explained. But since technical explaining and explicability provide the criterion for what can claim to be real, the inexplicable residue left over becomes the superfluous. In this way the mysterious is only what is left over, what is not yet accounted for and incorporated within the circuit of explicative procedures.
It would surely be simplistic and not thoughtful at all if we were saying that the little ego of some individual man were capable of elevating calculability to the rank of the measure of the reality of the real. Instead, the modern age corresponds to the metaphysical depth of the course of its history, when, in accordance with its will toward the unconditional "residuelessness" of all procedure and all organizing, it builds broad avenues through all continents and so no longer has a place free for that residue in which the mystery would still glimmer in the form of mere inexplicability. The secret in the mystery is a kind of concealment, characterized by its insignificance, in virtue of which the mystery is an open one. We readily misuse the term "open secret" or "open mystery" and apply it to the situation where there is precisely nothing secret or mysterious at all but where what is already known by everyone is not supposed to be brought into the open. The "open mystery" in the genuine and strict sense, on the contrary, occurs where the concealing of the mysterious is simply experienced as concealedness and is lodged in a historically arisen reticence. The openness of the open mystery does not consist in solving the mystery, thus destroying it, but consists in not touching the concealedness of the simple and essential and letting this concealedness alone in its appearance. The insignificance of the concealment proper to the genuine mystery is already a result of the essence of the simple, which for its part is grounded primordially.
Another kind of concealment within the mysterious is displayed by the clandestine, under the cover of which, e.g., a conspiracy simmers. There the concealment has the character of an extended yet at the same time tightly knit ambush, lying in wait for the moment of the sudden outburst. The inconspicuous is here, too. But now it takes the form of camouflage and deception. Therefore this inconspicuousness must explicitly protrude everywhere and must always be concerned with safeguarding its outward appearance
Far away from these modes of concealment, and yet within the sphere of the same essence, resides the concealed in the sense of the merely not yet known. This concealment includes, e.g., the horizon of scientific