The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

The writer to whom we owe a comparative history of the systems of philosophy, written with thought and impartiality, has felt keenly that skepticism ought to be considered under two relations: as skepticism of criticism and reform, necessary to correct the presumption of the hiunan mind and to destroy its prejudices; as skepticism absolute and determined, which confounds in a common proscription both truth and error.' The first, of which Socrates gave the example, and which Bacon and Descartes have revived, is a sort of intellectual remedy that Providence prepares for healing one of the most fatal maladies of the human mind, that kind of presumptuous ignorance which makes one believe that he knows that which he does not know: the second, which is only the excess and abuse of the first, is this same remedy transformed into poison by an a &1J rep 0iJ\\<>»> yev€^, Tolt] Si Kal avSpwv. Iliad, 1. vi., v. 146.

* The Brahmans call the illusion which results from this veil maya. According to them, there is only the Supreme Being who really and absolutely exists; all the rest is maya, that is to say, phenomenal, even the trinity formed by Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra.

« De G^rando, Hist. comp. des Systimes de philos., t. iii., p. 360.

Examinations of the Golden Verses 203

aberration of the human reason which transports it beyond the draimstances which invoke its action, and employs it to devour itself and to exhaust in their source all the causes which cooperate in the progress of human understanding." Arcesilaus was the first to introduce it into the Academy by exaggerating the maxims of Socrates, and Pyrrho made a special system of destruction in it, under the name of Pyrrhonism. This system, welcomed in Greece, soon infected it with its venom, notwithstanding the vigorous resistance of Zeno the Stoic, whom Providence had raised up to oppose its ravages.* Carried to Rome by Cameades, the head of the third academy, it alarmed with its maxims subversive of public morals, Cato the Censor, who confounding it with philosophy conceived for it an implacable hatred/ This rigid repubUcan, hearing Carneades speak against justice, denying the existence of virtues, attacking the Divine Providence, and questioning the fundamental verities of religion, held in contempt a science which could bring forth such arguments.'' He urged the return of the Greek philosophy, so that the Roman youth might not be imbued with its errors; but the evil was done. The destructive germs that Carneades had left, fermented secretly in the heart of the State, developed under the first favourable conditions, increased and produced at last that formidable colossus, which, after taking possession of the public mind, having obscured the most enlightened ideas of good and evil, annihilated religion, and delivered the Republic to disorder, civil wars, and destruction; and raising itself again

"De G^rando, Hist. comp. des Systimes de philos., t. iii., p. 361.

c Plutarch, in Catone majore.

* Zeno having been thrown by a storm into the port of Piraeus at Athens, all his life regarded this accident as a blessing from Providence, which had enabled him to devote himself to philosophy and to obey the voice of an oracle which had ordered him to assume "the colour of the dead"; that is, to devote himself to the study of the ancients and to sustain their doctrine.

<* Plutarch, ibid.; Cic^r., de Rep., 1. ii.; Apud Nonium voce Calumnia. Lactant. 1. v., c. 14.

204 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras