With no desire to deprive Mr. Bok of his bread, I wish to call attention
to Pythagoras, who lived a little more than five hundred years before
Christ.
Even at that time the world was old. Memphis, which was built four
thousand years ago, had begun to crumble into ruins. Troy was buried
deep in the dust which an American citizen of German birth was to
remove. Nineveh and Babylon were dying the death that success always
brings, and the star of empire was preparing to westward wend its way.
Pythagoras ushered in the Golden Age of Greece. All the great writers
whom he immediately preceded, quote him and refer to him. Some admire
him; others are loftily critical; most of them are a little jealous; and
a few use him as a horrible example, calling him a poseur, a pedant, a
learned sleight-of-hand man, a bag of books.
Trial by newspaper was not invented in the time of Pythagoras; but
personal vilification has been popular since Balaam talked gossip with
his vis-a-vis.
Anaxagoras, who gave up his wealth to the State that he might be free,
and who was the teacher of Pericles, was a pupil of Pythagoras, and used
often to mention him.
In this way Pericles was impressed by the Pythagorean philosophy, and
very often quotes it in his speeches. Socrates gave Pythagoras as an
authority on the simple life, and stated that he was willing to follow
him in anything save his injunction to keep silence. Socrates wanted
silence optional; whereas Pythagoras required each of his pupils to live
for a year without once asking a question or making an explanation. In
aggravated cases he made the limit five years.
In many ways Pythagoras reminds us of our friend Muldoon, both being
beneficent autocrats, and both proving their sincerity by taking their
own medicine. Pythagoras said, "I will never ask another to do what I
have not done, and am not willing to do myself."
To this end he was once challenged by his three hundred pupils to remain
silent for a year. He accepted the defi, not once defending himself from
the criticisms and accusations that were rained upon him, not once
complaining, nor issuing an order. Tradition has it, however, that he
made averages good later on, when the year of expiation was ended.
There are two reasonably complete lives of Pythagoras, one by Diogenes
Laertius, and another by Iamblichus. Personally, I prefer the latter, as
Iamblichus, as might be inferred from his name, makes Pythagoras a
descendant of Æneas, who was a son of Neptune. This is surely better
than the abrupt and somewhat sensational statement to the effect that
his father was Apollo.
* * * * *
The birthplace of Pythagoras was Samos, an isle of Greece. He was born
of wealthy but honest parents, who were much in love with each other--a
requisite, says Pythagoras, for parentage on its highest plane. It is
probable that Pythagoras was absolutely correct in his hypothesis.
That he was a very noble specimen of manhood--physically and
mentally--there is no doubt. He was tall, lithe, dignified, commanding
and silent by nature, realizing fully that a handsome man can never talk
as well as he looks.
He was quite aware of his physical graces, and in following up the facts
of his early life, he makes the statement that his father was a
sea-captain and trader. He then incidentally adds that the best results
are obtained for posterity where a man is absent from his family eleven
months in the year. This is an axiom agreed upon by many modern
philosophers, few of whom, however, live up to their ideals.
Aristophanes, who was on friendly terms with some of the disciples of
Pythagoras, suggested in one of his plays that the Pythagorean domestic
time-limit should be increased at least a month for the good of all
concerned.
Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle make frequent references to Pythagoras. In
order to impress men like these, the man must have taught a very exalted
philosophy. In truth, Pythagoras was a teacher of teachers. And like all
men who make a business of wisdom he sometimes came tardy off, and
indulged in a welter of words that wrecked the original idea--if there
were one.
There are these three: Knowledge, Learning, Wisdom. And the world has
until very recent times assumed that they were practically one and the
same thing.
Knowledge consists of the things we know, not the things we believe or
the things we assume. Knowledge is a personal matter of intuition,
confirmed by experience. Learning consists largely of the things we
memorize and are told by persons or books. Tomlinson of Berkeley Square
was a learned man. When we think of a learned man, we picture him as one
seated in a library surrounded by tomes that top the shelves.
Wisdom is the distilled essence of what we have learned from experience.
It is that which helps us to live, work, love and make life worth living
for all we meet. Men may be very learned, and still be far from wise.
Pythagoras was one of those strange beings who are born with a desire to
know, and who finally comprehending the secret of the Sphinx, that there
is really nothing to say, insist on saying it. That is, vast learning is
augmented by a structure of words, and on this is built a theogony.
Practically he was a priest.
Worked into all priestly philosophies are nuggets of wisdom that shine
like stars in the darkness and lead men on and on.
All great religions have these periods of sanity, otherwise they would
have no followers at all. The followers, understanding little bits of
this and that, hope finally to understand it all. Inwardly the initiates
at the shrine of their own conscience know that they know nothing. When
they teach others they are obliged to pretend that they, themselves,
fully comprehend the import of what they are saying. The novitiate
attributes his lack of perception to his own stupidity, and many great
teachers encourage this view.
"Be patient, and you shall some day know," they say, and smile frigidly.
And when credulity threatens to balk and go no further, magic comes to
the rescue and the domain of Hermann and Kellar is poached upon.
Mystery and miracle were born in Egypt. It was there that a system was
evolved, backed up by the ruler, of religious fraud so colossal that
modern deception looks like the bungling efforts of an amateur. The
government, the army, the taxing power of the State, were sworn to
protect gigantic safes in which was hoarded--nothing. That is to say,
nothing but the pretense upon which cupidity and self-hypnotized
credulity battened and fattened.
All institutions which through mummery, strange acts, dress and ritual,
affect to know and impart the inmost secrets of creation and ultimate
destiny, had their rise in Egypt. In Egypt now are only graves, tombs,
necropolises and silence. The priests there need no soldiery to keep
their secrets safe. Ammon-Ra, who once ruled the universe, being finally
exorcised by Yaveh, is now as dead as the mummies who once were men and
upheld his undisputed sway.
* * * * *
The Egyptians guarded their mysteries with jealous dread.
We know their secret now. It is this--there are no mysteries.
That is the only secret upon which any secret society holds a caveat.
Wisdom can not be corraled with gibberish and fettered in jargon.
Knowledge is one thing--palaver another. The Greek-letter societies of
our callow days still survive in bird's-eye, and next to these come the
Elks, who take theirs with seltzer and a smile, as a rare good joke,
save that brotherhood and good-fellowship are actually a saving salt
which excuses much that would otherwise be simply silly.
All this mystery and mysticism was once official, and later, on being
discarded by the authorities, was continued by the students as a kind of
prank.
Greek-letter societies are the rudimentary survivals of what was once an
integral part of every college. Making dead languages optional was the
last convulsive kick of the cadaver.
And now a good many colleges are placing the seal of their disapproval
on secret societies among the students; and the day is near when the
secret society will not be tolerated, either directly or indirectly, as
a part of the education of youth. All this because the sophomoric mind
is prone to take its Greek-letter mysteries seriously, and regard the
college curriculum as a joke of the faculty.
If knowledge were to be gained by riding a goat, any petty crossroads,
with its lodge-room over the grocery, would contain a Herbert Spencer;
and the agrarian mossbacks would have wisdom by the scruff and detain
knowledge with a tail-hold.
There can be no secrets in life and morals, because Nature has so
provided that every beautiful thought you know and every precious
sentiment you feel, shall shine out of your face so that all who are
great enough may see, know, understand, appreciate and appropriate. You
can keep things only by giving them away.
When Pythagoras was only four or five years old, his mother taught him
to take his morning bath in the cold stream, and dry his baby skin by
running in the wind. As he ran, she ran with him, and together they sang
a hymn to the rising sun, that for them represented the god Apollo.
This mother taught him to be indifferent to cold, heat, hunger, to exult
in endurance, and to take a joy in the glow of the body.
So the boy grew strong and handsome, and proud; and perhaps it was in
those early years, from the mother herself, that he gathered the idea,
afterward developed, that Apollo had appeared to his mother, and so
great was the beauty of the god that the woman was actually overcome, it
being the first god at which she had ever had a good look.
The ambition of a great mother centers on her son. Pythagoras was filled
with the thought that he was different, peculiar, set apart to teach the
human race.
Having compassed all there was to learn in his native place, and, as he
thought, being ill appreciated, he started for Egypt, the land of
learning. The fallacy that knowledge was a secret to be gained by word
of mouth and to be gotten from books existed then as now. The mother of
Pythagoras wanted her son to comprehend the innermost secrets of the
Egyptian mysteries. He would then know all. To this end she sold her
jewels, in order that her son might have the advantages of an Egyptian
education.
Women were not allowed to know the divine secrets--only just a few
little ones. This woman wanted to know, and she said her son would
learn, and tell her.
The family had become fairly rich by this time, and influential. Letters
were gotten from the great ones of Samos to the Secretary of State in
Egypt. And so Pythagoras, aged twenty, "the youth with the beautiful
hair," went on his journey to Egypt and knocked boldly at the doors of
the temples at Memphis, where knowledge was supposed to be in stock.
Religion then monopolized all schools and continued to do so for quite
some time after Pythagoras was dead.
He was turned away with the explanation that no foreigner could enter
the sacred portals--that the initiates must be those born in the shadows
of the temples and nurtured in the faith from infancy by holy virgins.
Pythagoras still insisted, and it was probably then that he found a
sponsor who made for him the claim that he was a son of Apollo. And the
holy men peeped out of their peep-holes in holy admiration for any one
who could concoct as big a lie as they themselves had ever invented.
The boy surely looked the part. Perhaps, at last, here was one who was
what they pretended to be! Frauds believe in frauds, and rogues are more
easily captured by roguery than are honest men.
His admittance to the university became a matter of international
diplomacy. At last, being too hard-pressed, the wise ones who ran the
mystery monopoly gave in, and Pythagoras was informed that at midnight
of a certain night, he should present himself, naked, at the door of a
certain temple and he would be admitted.
On the stroke of the hour, at the appointed time, Pythagoras, the youth
with the beautiful hair, was there, clothed only in his beautiful hair.
He knocked on the great, bronze doors, but the only answer was a faint,
hollow echo.
Then he got a stone and pounded, but still no answer.
The wind sprang up fresh and cold. The young man was chilled to the
bone, but still he pounded and then called aloud demanding admittance.
His answer now was the growling and barking of dogs, within. Still he
pounded! After an interval a hoarse voice called out through a little
slide, ordering him to be gone or the dogs would be turned loose upon
him.
He demanded admittance.
"Fool, do you not know that the law says these doors shall admit no one
except at sunrise?"
"I only know that I was told to be here at midnight and I would be
admitted."
"All that may be true, but you were not told when you would be
admitted--wait, it is the will of the gods." So Pythagoras waited,
numbed and nearly dead.
The dogs which he had heard had, in some way, gotten out, and came
tearing around the corner of the great stone building. He fought them
with desperate strength. The effort seemed to warm his blood, and
whereas before he was about to retreat to his lodgings he now remained.
The day broke in the east, and gangs of slaves went by to work. They
jeered at him and pelted him with pebbles.
Suddenly across the desert sands he saw the faint pink rim of the rising
sun. On the instant the big bronze doors against which he was leaning
swung suddenly in. He fell with them, and coarse, rough hands seized his
hair and pulled him into the hall.
The doors swung to and closed with a clang. Pythagoras was in dense
darkness, lying on the stone floor.
A voice, seemingly coming from afar, demanded, "Do you still wish to go
on?"