The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

o The nearest root of this word is find, whence is derived finden, to find; its remote root is hand, the seat of touch, whence comes finger, that which feels; its primitive root is 1t< or T {dd or id), the hand in Phoenician. This last root, becoming nasal at the final and aspirate at the initial, has produced hand; fang, a capture, and find, a discovery. The syllable emp, which precedes the root find, expresses the movement which lifts up from below; lich designates that which disqualifies by identity, and keit, that which substantiates.

l> The root of this word is stand, a fixed thing, a state; its remote root is Stat, that which is permanent. Its primitive root is Tim (shdad), firmness, force, constancy. The initial syllable ver expresses the movement which carries far away, which transports from the place where one is, to that where one is not.

Examinations of the Golden Verses 211

The word Vernunft is applied to that sort of faculty, which consists in choosing at a distance, in wishing, in selecting, in electing that which is good." It is expressed by the word raison; but this expresses it very poorly, whatever may be the real meaning given it by Kant.

This philosopher ought to have realized more fully the origin of this word and he should have made a more just application; then his system would have taken another direction and he wotdd have attained his goal. He would have made us see, and he would have seen himself, the reality, namely, intelligence and not reason.

One can easily see that the faculty which Kant designates by the word Empfindlichkeit, sense perception, belongs to the physical part of man; and that which he expresses by the word Verstand, the understanding, resides in his animistic part; but one cannot see at all that what he names Vernunft, and which he continually confounds with reason, may be able in any manner to dominate in his intellectual part. For this, it would be necessary that he should consider it under the relation of the intelligence; which he has not done. It is very true that he has wished to place it constantly in the mind, by representing the three faculties of which man is composed as a sort of hierarchy, of which sense perception occupies the base, understanding the centre, and reason the summit; or as one of his translators said, imagining this hierarchy under the emblem of an empire, of which sense perception constitutes the subjects, understanding the

" The nearest root of tKIs word, as well as its remote root, has disappeared from the modem German, where one finds only its derivatives. Its primitive root is in the Latin word opt, whence comes opto, I choose; and optime, best. This root is attached to thfe Phoenician ejij? (wh6ph), anything which is raised above another thing. It becomes nasal in the German word and has changed the ph to ft. Prom it is derived the Saxon, English, Belgian, and Danish word up, which expresses the movement of everything which tends above. Also from it, the German word luft, air, and the English word aloft, that which is elevated. The preposition ver has taken the final n, placing it before unft, as it carries it constantly in its analogue /er», that which is distant. Likewise one saysfernglass, a telescope with which one sees at a distance.

212 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras agents or ministers, and reason the sovereign or legislator." I cannot conceive how Kant, by giving the word Vernunfi, the meaning of the Latin word ratio, has been able to say that it is the highest degree of the activity of a mind which has the power of all its liberty, and the consciousness of all its strength*: there is nothing more false. Reason does not exist in liberty, but on the contrary, in necessity. Its movement, which is geometric, is always forced: it is an inference from the point of departure, and nothing more. Let us examine this carefully. The Latin word ratio, whose meaning Kant has visibly followed, has never translated exactly the Greek word logos, in the sense of word; and if the Greek philosophers have substituted sometimes the logos for nous, or the word for the intelligence, by taking the effect for the cause, it is wrong when the Romans have tried to imitate them, by using ratio, in place of mens, or intelligentia. In this they have proved their ignorance and have disclosed the calamitous ravages that skepticism had already made among them. The word ratio springs from the root ra or rat, which in all the tongues where it has been received, has carried the idea of a ray, a straight Une drawn from one point to another.' Thus reason, far from being free as Kant has pretended, is what is the most constrained in nature: it is a geometric line, always subject to the point whence it emanates, and forced to strike the point toward which it is directed under penalty of ceasing to be itself; that is to say, of ceasing to be straight. Now, reason not being free in its course, is neither good nor bad in itself ; it is always analogous to the principle of which it is the