philosophy to be skeptical; the theosophist speaks by faith, the
physicist speaks by reason; the doctrine of the one excludes the
discussion that the system of the other admits and even necessitates.
Up to that time, theosophy dominating upon the earth had taught the
influence of the will, and the tradition which was preserved in it
among all the nations of the earth during an incalculable succession
of centuries gave it the force of demonstration. Among the Indians,
Krishna; among the Persians, Zoroaster; in China, Kong-Tse; in Egypt,
Thoth; among the Greeks, Orpheus; even Odin, among the Scandinavians;
everywhere the lawgivers of the people had linked the liberty of man
with the consoling dogma of Divine Providence.[336] The peoples
accustomed to worship in polytheism the Divine Infinity and not its
Unity, did not find it strange to be guided, protected, and watched
over on the one side, whereas they remained, on the other, free in
their movements; and they did not trouble themselves to find the
source of good and evil since they saw it in the objects of their
cult, in these same gods, the greater part of whom being neither
essentially good nor essentially bad were reputed to inspire in them
the virtues or the vices which, gathered freely by them, rendered them
worthy of recompense or chastisement.[337] But when Natural Philosophy
appeared, the face of things was changed. The natural philosophers,
substituting the observation of nature and experience for mental
contemplation and the inspiration of theosophists, thought that they
could make sentient what was intelligible, and promised to prove by
fact and reasoning whatever up to that time had had only proofs of
sentiment and analogy. They brought to light the great mystery of
Universal Unity, and transforming this Intellectual Unity into
corporal substance placed it in water,[338] in infinite space,[339] in
the air,[340] in the fire,[341] whence they draw in turn the essential
and formal existence of all things. The one, attached to the school of
Ionia, established as fundamental maxim, that there is but one
principle of all; and the other, attached to that of Elea, started
from this axiom that nothing is made from nothing.[342] The former
sought the _how_, and the latter the _why_ of things; and all were
united in saying that there is no effect without cause. Their
different systems, based upon the principles of reasoning which seemed
incontestable, and supported by a series of imposing conclusions, had,
at first, a prodigious success; but this _éclat_ paled considerably
when soon the disciples of Pythagoras, and a little later those of
Socrates and Plato, having received from their masters the
theosophical tradition, stopped these sophistical physicists in the
midst of their triumphs, and, asking them the cause of physical and of
moral evil, proved to them that they knew nothing of it; and that, in
whatever fashion they might deduce it by their system, they could not
avoid establishing an absolute fatality, destructive to the liberty of
man, which by depriving it of morality of actions, by confounding vice
and virtue, ignorance and wisdom, made of the Universe no more than a
frightful chaos. In vain these had thrust back the reproach and
claimed that the inference was false; their adversaries pursuing them
on their own ground cried out to them: If the principle that you admit
is good, whence comes it that men are wicked and miserable?[343] If
this unique principle is bad, whence emerge goodness and virtue?[344]
If nature is the expression of this sole principle, how is it not
constant and why does its government sow goodness and evil?[345] The
materialists had recourse vainly to a certain deviation in atoms,[346]
and the spiritualists, to a certain adjuvant cause quite similar to
efficacious grace[347]; the theosophists would never have renounced
them if they had not enclosed them in a syllogistic circle, by making
them admit, sometimes that the unique and all-powerful Principle
cannot think of everything,[348] sometimes that vice is useful and
that without it there would be no virtue[349]; paradoxes of which they
had no trouble demonstrating the absurdity and the revolting
inferences.[350]
Take a survey of all the nations of the world, peruse all the books
that you please, and you will find the liberty of man, the free will
of his actions, the influence of his will over his passions, only in
the theosophical tradition. Wherever you see physical or metaphysical
systems, doctrines of whatever kind they may be, founded upon a sole
principle of the material or spiritual Universe, you can conclude
boldly that absolute fatality results from it and that their authors
find themselves in need of making two things one: or of explaining the
origin of good and evil, which is impossible; or of establishing the
free will _a priori_, which is a manifest contradiction of their
reasonings. If you care to penetrate into metaphysical depths, examine
this decisive point upon this matter. Moses founded his cult upon the
Unity of God and he explained the origin of evil; but he found himself
forced by the very nature of this formidable mystery to envelop his
explanation with such a veil, that it remained impenetrable for all
those who had not received the traditional revelation; so that the
liberty of man existed in his cult only by favour of theosophical
tradition, and that it became weaker and disappeared entirely from it
with this same tradition, the two opposed sects of the Pharisees and
Sadducees which divided the cult prove this.[351] The former, attached
to the tradition and allegorizing the text of the _Sepher_,[352]
admitted the free will[353]; the others, on the contrary, rejecting it
and following the literal meaning, established an irresistible destiny
to which all was subjected. The most orthodox Hebrews, and those even
who passed as seers or prophets of the nation, had no difficulty in
attributing to God the cause of Evil.[354] They were obviously
authorized by the history of the downfall of the first man, and by the
dogma of original sin, which they took according to the meaning
attached to it by the vulgar. It also happened, after the
establishment of Christianity and of Islamism, that this dogma,
received by both cults in all its extent and in all its literal
obscurity, has necessarily drawn with it predestination, which is, in
other words, only the fatality of the ancients. Mohammed, more
enthusiast than learned, and stronger in imagination than in
reasoning, has not hesitated a moment, admitting it as an inevitable
result of the Unity of God, which he announced after Moses.[355] It is
true that a few Christian doctors, when they have been capable of
perceiving the inferences in it have denied this predestination, and
have wished, either by allegorizing the dogma of original sin, as
Origen, or rejecting it wholly, as Pelagius, to establish the free
will and the power of the will; but it is easy to see, in reading the
history of the church, that the most rigid Christians, such as Saint
Augustine and the ecclesiastical authority itself, have always upheld
predestination as proceeding necessarily from the divine Prescience
and from the All-Powerful, without which there is no Unity. The length
of this examination forces me to suspend the proofs that I was going
to give regarding this last assertion; but further on I will return to
it.
8. _Be sober, diligent, and chaste; avoid all wrath.
In public or in secret ne’er permit thou
Any evil; and above all else respect thyself._
Pythagoras considered man under three principal modifications, like
the Universe; and this is why he gave to man the name of the microcosm
or the small world.[356] Nothing was more common among the ancient
nations than to compare the Universe to a grand man, and man, to a
small Universe.[357] The Universe, considered as a grand and animated
All, composed of intelligence, soul and body, was called Pan or
Phanes.[358][359] Man, or microcosm, was composed in the same way but
in an inverse manner, of body, soul, and intelligence; and each of
these three parts was, in its turn, considered under three
modifications, so that the ternary ruling in the whole ruled equally
in the least of its subdivisions. Each ternary, from that which
embraced Immensity, to that which constituted the weakest individual
was, according to Pythagoras, included in an absolute or relative
Unity, and formed thus, as I have already said, the Quaternary or
Sacred Tetrad of the Pythagoreans. This Quaternary was universal or
particular. Pythagoras was not, however, the inventor of this
doctrine: it was spread from China to the depths of Scandinavia.[360]
One finds it likewise expressed in the oracles of Zoroaster.[361]
In the Universe a Ternary shines forth,
And the Monad is its principle.
Thus, according to this doctrine, Man, considered as a relative unity
contained in the absolute Unity of the Grand All, presents himself as
the universal ternary, under three principal modifications, of body,
soul, and spirit or intelligence. The soul, considered as the seat of
the passions, is presented in its turn, under the three faculties of
the rational, irascible or appetent soul. Now, in the opinion of
Pythagoras, the vice of the appetent faculty of the soul is
intemperance or avarice; that of the irascible faculty is cowardice;
and that of the rational faculty is folly. The vice which reaches
these three faculties is injustice. In order to avoid these vices, the
philosopher commends four principal virtues to his disciples:
temperance for the appetent faculty, courage for the irascible
faculty, prudence for the rational faculty, and for these three
faculties together, justice, which he regards as the most perfect
virtue of the soul.[362] I say the soul, because the body and the
intelligence, being equally developed by means of three faculties
instinctive or spiritual, as well as the soul, were susceptible of the
vices and the virtues which were peculiar to them.
9. _Speak not nor act before thou hast reflected;
Be just._
By the preceding lines, Lysis, speaking in the name of Pythagoras, had
commended temperance and diligence; he had prescribed particularly
watching over the irascible faculty, and moderating its excesses; by
these, he indicates the peculiar character of prudence which is
reflection and he imposes the obligation of being just, by binding, as
it were, the most energetic idea of justice with that of death, as may
be seen in the subsequent lines:
10. … _Remember that a power invincible
Ordains to die_; …
That is to say, remember thou that the fatal necessity to which thou
art subjected in reference to the material and mortal part of thyself,
according to the sentence of the ancient sages,[363] will strike thee
particularly in the objects of thy cupidity, of thy intemperance, in
the things which will have excited thy folly, or flattered thy
cowardice; remember thou that death will break the frail instruments
of thy wrath, will extinguish the firebrands that it will have
lighted; remember thou finally,
11. … _That riches and the honours
Easily acquired, are easy thus to lose._
Be just: injustice has often easy triumphs; but what remains after
death of the riches that it has procured? Nothing but the bitter
remembrance of their loss, and the nakedness of a shameful vice
uncovered and reduced to impotency.
I have proceeded rapidly in the explanation of the foregoing lines,
because the morals which they contain, founded upon the proofs of
sentiment, are not susceptible of receiving others. I do not know if
this simple reflection has already been made, but in any case it ought
to draw with it one more complicated, and serve to find the reason for
the surprising harmony which reigns, and which has always reigned,
among all the peoples of the earth upon the subject of morals. Man has
been allowed to disagree upon subjects of reasoning and opinion, to
differ in a thousand ways in those of taste, to dispute upon the forms
of cult, the dogmas of teachings, the bases of science, to build an
infinity of psychological and physical systems; but Man has never been
able, without belying his own conscience, to deny the truth and
universality of morals. Temperance, prudence, courage, and justice,
have always been considered as virtues, and avarice, folly, cowardice,
and injustice, as vices; and this, without the least discussion. Never
has any legislator said that it was necessary to be a bad son, a bad
friend, a bad citizen, envious, ungrateful, perjured. The men most
beset with these vices have always hated them in others, have
concealed them at home, and their very hypocrisy has been a new homage
rendered to morals.
If certain sectarians, blinded by a false zeal and furthermore
systematically ignorant and intolerant, have circulated that the cults
differing from theirs lacked morals, or received impure ones, it is
because they either misunderstood the true principles of morals, or
they calumniated them; principles are the same everywhere; only their
application is more or less rigid and their consequences are more or
less well applied in accordance with the times, the places, and the
men. The Christians extol, and with reason, the purity and the
sanctity of their morals; but if it must be told them with frankness
they have nothing in their sacred books that cannot be found as
forcibly expressed in the sacred books of other nations, and often
even, in the opinion of impartial travellers, one has seen it much
better practised. For example, the beautiful maxim touching upon the
pardon of offences[364] is found complete in the _Zend-Avesta_. It is
written: “O God! greater than all that which is great! if a man
provoke you by his thoughts, by his speech, or by his actions, if he
humbles himself before you, pardon him; even so, if a man provoke me
by his thoughts by his speech or by his actions may I pardon
him.”[365] One finds in the same book, the precept on charity, such as
is practised among the Mussulmans, and that of agriculture placed in
the rank of virtues, as among the Chinese. “The King whom you love,
what desire you that he shall do, Ormuzd? Do you desire that, like
unto you, he shall nourish the poor?”[366] “The purest point of the
law is to sow the land. He who sows the grain and does it with
purity is as great before me as he who celebrates ten thousand
adorations.…”[367] “Render the earth fertile, cover it with flowers
and with fruits; multiply the springs in the places where there is no
grass.”[368] This same maxim of the pardon of offences and those which
decree to return good for evil, and to do unto others what we would
that they should do unto us, is found in many of the Oriental
writings. One reads in the distichs of Hafiz this beautiful passage:
Learn of the sea-shell to love thine enemy, and to fill with
pearls the hand thrust out to harm thee. Be not less
generous than the hard rock; make resplendent with precious
stones, the arm which rends thy side. Mark thou yonder tree
assailed by a shower of stones; upon those who throw them it
lets fall only delicious fruits or perfumed flowers. The
voice of all nature calls aloud to us: shall man be the only
one refusing to heal the hand which is wounded in striking
him? To bless the one who offends him?[369]
The evangelical precept paraphrased by Hafiz is found in substance in
a discourse of Lysias; it is clearly expressed by Thales and Pittacus;
Kong-Tse taught it in the same words as Jesus; finally one finds in
the _Arya_, written more than three centuries before our era, these
lines which seem made expressly to inculcate the maxim and depict the
death of the righteous man:
The duty of a good man, even at the moment of his
destruction, consists not only in forgiving but even in a
desire of benefiting his destroyer; as the Sandal-tree, in
the instant of its overthrow sheds perfume on the ax which
fells; and he would triumph in repeating the verse of Sadi
who represents a return of good for good as a slight
reciprocity, but says to the virtuous man, “confer benefits
on him who has injured thee.”[370]
Interrogate the peoples from the Boreal pole to the extremities of
Asia, and ask them what they think of virtue: they will respond to
you, as Zeno, that it is all that is good and beautiful; the
Scandinavians, disciples of Odin, will show you the _Hâvamâl_[371],
sublime discourse of their ancient legislator, wherein hospitality,
charity, justice, and courage are expressly commended to them: You
will know by tradition that the Celts had the sacred verses of their
Druids, wherein piety, justice, and valour were celebrated as national
virtues[372]; you will see in the books preserved under the name of
Hermes[373] that the Egyptians followed the same idea regarding morals
as the Indians their ancient preceptors; and these ideas, preserved
still in the _Dharma-Shastra_,[374] will strike you in the _Kings_ of
the Chinese. It is there, in those sacred books whose origin is lost
in the night of time,[375] that you will find at their source the most
sublime maxims of Fo-Hi, Krishna, Thoth, Zoroaster, Pythagoras,
Socrates, and Jesus. Morals, I repeat, are everywhere the same;
therefore it is not upon its written principles that one should judge
of the perfection of the cult, as has been done without reflection,
but upon their practical application. This application, whence results
the national spirit, depends upon the purity of the religious dogmas,
upon the sublimity of the mysteries, and upon their more or less great
affinity with the Universal Truth which is the soul, apparent or
hidden, of all religion.
12. _As to the evils which Destiny involves,
Judge them what they are; endure them all and strive,
As much as thou art able, to modify the traits.
The Gods, to the most cruel, have not exposed the sage._
I have said that Pythagoras acknowledged two motives of human actions,
the power of the Will and the necessity of Destiny, and that he
subjected both to one fundamental law called Providence from which
they emanated alike. The first of these motives was free, and the
second constrained: so that man found himself placed between two
opposed, but not injurious natures, indifferently good or bad,
according as he understood the use of them. The power of the Will was
exercised upon the things to be done, or upon the future; the
necessity of Destiny, upon the things done, or upon the past: and the
one nourished the other unceasingly, by working upon the materials
which they reciprocally furnished each other; for according to this
admirable philosopher, it is of the past that the future is born, of
the future that the past is formed, and of the union of both that is
engendered the always existing present, from which they draw alike
their origin: a most profound idea that the Stoics had adopted.[376]
Thus, following this doctrine, liberty rules in the future, necessity
in the past, and Providence over the present. Nothing that exists
happens by chance but by the union of the fundamental and providential
law with the human will which follows or transgresses it, by operating
upon necessity.[377] The harmony of the Will and Providence
constitutes Good; Evil is born of their opposition. Man has received
three forces adapted to each of the three modifications of his being,
to be guided in the course that he should pursue on earth and all
three enchained to his Will. The first, attached to the body, is
instinct; the second, devoted to the soul, is virtue; the third,
appertaining to intelligence, is science or wisdom. These three
forces, indifferent in themselves, take this name only through the
good usage that the Will makes of it; for, through bad usage they
degenerate into brutishness, vice, and ignorance. Instinct perceives
the physical good or evil resulting from sensation; virtue recognizes
the moral good or evil existing in sentiment; science judges the
intelligible good or evil which springs from assent. In sensation,
good or evil is called pleasure or pain; in sentiment, love or hate;
in assent, truth or error. Sensation, sentiment, and assent, dwelling
in the body, in the soul, and in the spirit, form a ternary, which
becoming developed under favour of a relative unity constitutes the
human quaternary, or Man considered abstractly. The three affections
which compose this ternary act and react upon one another, and become
mutually enlightened or obscured; and the unity which binds them, that
is to say, Man, is perfected or depraved, according as it tends to
become blended with the Universal Unity or to become distinguished
from it. The means that this ternary has of becoming blended with it,
or of becoming distinguished from it, of approaching near or of
drawing away from it, resides wholly in its Will, which, through the
use that it makes of the instruments furnished it by the body, soul,
and mind, becomes instinctive or stupefied; is made virtuous or
vicious, wise or ignorant, and places itself in condition to perceive
with more or less energy, to understand and to judge with more or less
rectitude what there is of goodness, excellence, and justice in
sensation, sentiment, or assent; to distinguish, with more or less
force and knowledge, good and evil; and not to be deceived at last in
what is really pleasure or pain, love or hatred, truth or error.
Indeed one feels that the metaphysical doctrine that I have just
briefly set forth is nowhere found so clearly expressed, and therefore
I do not need to support it with any direct authority. It is only by
adopting the principles set down in the Golden Verses and by
meditating a long time upon what has been written by Pythagoras that
one is able to conceive the _ensemble_. The disciples of this
philosopher having been extremely discreet and often obscure, one can
only well appreciate the opinions of their master by throwing light
upon them with those of the Platonists and Stoics, who have adopted
and spread them without any reserve.[378]
Man, such as I have just depicted him, according to the idea that
Pythagoras had conceived, placed under the dominion of Providence
between the past and the future, endowed with a free will by his
essence, and being carried along toward virtue or vice with its own
movement, Man, I say, should understand the source of the evils that
he necessarily experiences; and far from accusing this same Providence
which dispenses good and evil to each according to his merit and his
anterior actions, can blame only himself if he suffers, through an
inevitable consequence of his past mistakes.[379] For Pythagoras
admitted many successive existences,[380] and maintained that the
present, which strikes us, and the future, which menaces us, are only
the expression of the past which has been our work in anterior times.
He said that the greater part of men lose, in returning to life, the
remembrance of these past existences; but that, concerning himself, he
had, by a particular favour of the gods, preserved the memory of
them.[381] Thus according to his doctrine, this fatal Necessity, of
which man unceasingly complains, has been created by himself through
the use of his will; he traverses, in proportion as he advances in
time, the road that he has already traced for himself; and according
as he has modified it by good or evil, as he sows so to speak, his
virtues or his vices, he will find it again more smooth or laborious,
when the time will come to traverse it anew.
These are the dogmas by means of which Pythagoras established the
necessity of Destiny, without harming the power of the Will, and left
to Providence its universal empire, without being obliged either to
attribute to it the origin of evil, as those who admitted only one
principle of things, or to give to evil an absolute existence, as
those who admitted two principles. In this, he was in accordance with
the ancient doctrine which was followed by the oracles of the
gods.[382] The Pythagoreans, however, did not regard pain, that is to
say, whatever afflicts the body in its mortal life, as veritable
evils; they called veritable evils only sins, vices, and errors into
which one falls voluntarily. In their opinion, the physical and
inevitable evils being illustrated by the presence of virtue, could be
transformed into blessings and become distinguished and enviable.[383]
These last evils, dependent upon necessity, Lysis commended to be
judged for what they were; that is, to consider as an inevitable
consequence of some mistake, as the chastisement or remedy for some
vice; and therefore to endure them, and far from irritating them
further by impatience and anger, on the contrary to modify them by the
resignation and acquiescence of the will to the judgment of
Providence. He does not forbid, as one sees in the lines cited,
assuaging them by lawful means; on the contrary, he desires that the
sage should apply himself to diverting them if possible, and healing
them. Thus this philosopher did not fall into the excess with which
the Stoics have been justly reproached.[384] He considered pain evil,
not that it was of the same nature as vice, but because its nature, a
purgative for vice, makes it a necessary consequence. Plato adopted
this idea, and made all the inferences felt with his customary
eloquence.[385]