1 Pythagoras; Philosophic Romanticism.

I PYTHAGORAS; PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM
Numbers, wherein we moderns see nothing but
figures, are not so dead and inert as we have
decreed. A strange sentence, indeed, which we
have not passed on anything else in this vast
universe, wherein we pique ourselves on finding,
singing and celebrating only "Life!"
Number also is a part of Life. It is Rhythm.
Perhaps it shows itself even more essentially
living than most of our sensations, and, far from
being a mere convention established by prehistoric
arithmeticians, has as its origin in ourselves the
very beat of our hearts.
This exclusion of Number presents an incomprehensible
anomaly. All our sciences, Astronomy,
Physics, Mechanics, Chemistry, are based
on Mathematics, whose importance increases from
day to day; Philosophy alone, although open to all
these sciences which everywhere encompass it,
remains inhospitably closed to the master of them
all. Upon Number alone and its nature does
Philosophy refuse to meditate. It is perhaps
needless to seek further for the cause of that
decadence into which it is irresistibly slipping, and
of its visible impotence before moral and metaphysical
questions, which it persists in treating
according to the worn-out processes of a banal
lifeless scholasticism, in the paltry style of an old
professor of rhetoric attempting to produce
literature.
And this because, since the time of Pythagoras,
we have completely lost our perception of the
simple, warm, natural life of Numbers. That
great thinker, earliest of the philosophers, has
been ridiculously deformed by legend. We should
not forget, nevertheless, that from his school came
Aeschylus, creator of Tragedy, Epicharmus,
founder of Comedy, and a hundred other poets,
mathematicians, artists, legislators, naturalists,
all creators, who in reality constituted the Hellenic
grandeur, the origin of our civilization. A
Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle represent, in fact,
but the second outpouring of Greek thought.
Again, we should recall the unanimous testimony
of the ancients. This same Pythagoras whom we
see, on the solemn eve of the Medic Wars, inspiring
the minds of their heroes and of the geniuses of the
Age of Pericles, is believed to have revived the
tradition of teachings attributed, more or less
authentically, to that Orpheus whom we find, near
the epoch of Troy, in the dawn of that other great
epoch of Greece, which gave us Homer and Hesiod.
Is it surprising to discover that in this Orpheo-
Pythagoric teaching, although today disdained,
there lies a treasure of human thought?
Unhappily, Orphism and Pythagorism have
only come down to us disfigured in the most
ridiculous fashion, first by the Alexandrine charlatans
and later by those of the Renaissance,
that is to say, by the decay of the two great
original eras of Europe, the Greek and the Mediaeval.
This does not at all signify, however, that
at the end of the first the authentic documents of
Pythagorism had disappeared. On the contrary,
we find the powerful influence of the doctrine,
its spirit of ANALOGY, and particularly of numerical
analogy, in almost all the best thought of
the Middle Ages (notably in theological writings),
thought thereby far removed from our own, but
thereby akin to that of Greece and Asia.
It is possible that the last Pythagoric works may
have finally disappeared, with so many others, at
the time of the Hundred Years War and the
Turkish invasion of Europe. Let us not forget
that, ignorant as we still are of mediaeval literature,
we can necessarily form but a very incomplete
idea of its sources. Only the survival of these old
Hellenic writings can explain that extraordinary
MELANGE of marvellously suggestive passages,
otherwise inaccountable, and of base absurdities
which forms the "hermetic" books of the 15th and
16th centuries. It was said, indeed, even during
the lifetime of Cornelius Agrippa, that intriguing
boaster whose OCCULT PHILOSOPHY contains,
besides its superstitious imbecilities, the curious
relationships of his Analogical Tables, that this
noisy wizard had merely plagiarized unintelligently
a manuscript of the Arabian Picatrix, which
was at that time to be found in the library of the
Kings of Spain. It is needless to recall how many
Greek works have come to us by way of the Arabs,
or how many have been lost which they
possessed.
The philosophy of the ancients comes to us
today with its most vigorous half amputated, so to
speak. By a singular tradition, the philosophic
teaching of modern peoples disguises this formidable
mutilation. It invites us to glide over so
disturbing a subject. Nevertheless, if ever that
prodigious lacuna should be filled by the reappearance
of the Pythagoric writings so esteemed by all
the Greek thinkers (for neither Aristotle nor Plato,
nor any of their rivals of the old school, manifested
any of our disdain for them) a veritable revolution,
comparable to that of romanticism in literature,
will be produced in our philosophy, so erudite,
subtile, purist like the last classics, difficult,
minute and particular, but curtailed, narrow and
"scholastic" in the etymological sense of the word!
Great is the distance from these mere academic
games to those antique doctrines each of which
founded a civilization! The Greek sage appears
intimately and naturally mingled with the tumultuous
life of the people, which he expressed and
transformed, almost in the fashion of the founders
of our religious orders. Whereas, coldly withdrawn
from the public to the fireside and the
library, our philosophy of professors and of themes,
by its evident impotence, yields place to the gross
empiricism of the modern leaders of men and of
those writers and artists who inspire them.
Between the imitation of defunct ages and the
ugliness of formless personality the last three
centuries have oscillated, with no bold new harmonies
to meet the storms of the future.
To the Greek so admirably endowed, and
also, it must be remembered, not yet desiccated
and hardened by an artificial and inelastic learning,
mathematical formulae sang like chords.
The smallest new discovery of this kind, instead of
being limited to scientific and mechanical applications,
penetrated him throughout, thrilled his
nerves and muscles and communicated its vibration
to all his thoughts, by its analogies, inexact,
no doubt, as they always are, and as he knew, but
so much the more fecund. When the Infinite
opens itself to our souls, the classification of their
responding impulses which is least artificial is that
which assumes a mathematical character, since it
is Mathematics alone which challenges the Infinite
to all possible combinations.
Do we begin to perceive what I seek to
suggest rather than to demonstrate the profundity
of the Pythagorean conception?
It is certain that no treason could be more fatal
to it, and in fact none has been, than the
inept numerical superstitions of Alexandrine and
of modern hermeticism. For to limit certain
numbers to some narrow meaning, to reduce to
some exclusive property their enormous fecundity,
is to go precisely contrary to the great Thinker to
whom these vile charlatans pretend to be attached,
but whose deadly parasites they are.
Even M. Chaignet, in his conscientious work on
Pythagoras, has done little but strive with the
superstitions which these gentry have heaped
about this great name, and whose crying contradictions
dishearten this excellent scholar, even
while he seems to perceive behind them, though
he lacks the power to seize it amid their conflicts
something lofty, rational, philosophic; in a word,
truly Greek.
In short, the monument yet remains to be
raised by our own strength. I believe that the
surest method will be the humblest: to gather
patiently, in a sort of dictionary, the numerical
analogies, extending them progressively to all
things with which we are acquainted, at least as
far as possible; then to seek in some way to multiply
them by means of the known laws of arithmetical
combinations; to note with care, on the other
hand, the point at which each one of these analogies
ceases to be exact, and to try to trace thus
a sort of provisory limit which will give them a
contour, a physiognomy less arbitrary and especially
less limited than that inflicted by superstition
upon the numbers 13, 7, etc.