One might as well
praise John Knox for creating the commons of Scotland with a view to the
future prosperity of that country - a consummation which his black
fanaticism assuredly never foresaw.
The chief practical doctrine of Pythagoras, that mankind are to be
governed on the principle of a community of eastern monks, makes for the
disintegration of rational civic life.
And his chief theoretical doctrines, of metempsychosis and the reduction
of everything to a system of numbers [Footnote: Vincenzo Dorsa, an
Albanian, has written two pamphlets on the survival of Greco-Roman
traditions in Calabria. They are difficult to procure, but whoever is
lucky enough to find them will be much helped in his understanding of
the common people. In one place, he speaks of the charm-formula of
Otto-Nave! (Eight-Nine) It is considered meet and proper, in the
presence of a suckling infant, to spit thrice and then call out, three
times, Otto-Nove! This brings luck; and the practice, he thinks, is an
echo of the number-system of Pythagoras.] - these are sheer lunacy.
Was it not something of a relapse, after the rigorous mental discipline
of old, to have a man gravely assuring his fellows that he is the son of
Hermes and the divinely appointed messenger of Apollo; treating
diseases, like an Eskimo Angekok, by incantation; recording veracious
incidents of his experiences during a previous life in Hell, which he
seems to have explored almost as thoroughly as Swedenborg; dabbling in
magic, and consulting dreams, birds and the smoke of incense as oracles?
And in the exotic conglomerate of his teachings are to be found the
prima stamina of much that is worse: the theory of the pious fraud
which has infected Latin countries to this day; the Jesuitical maxim of
the end justifying the means; the insanity of preferring deductions to
facts which has degraded philosophy up to the days of Kant; mysticism,
demon-worship and much else of pernicious mettle - they are all there,
embryonically embedded in Pythagoras.
We are told much of his charity; indeed, an English author has written a
learned work to prove that Pythagoreanism has close affinities with
Christianity. Charity has now been tried on an ample scale, and has
proved a dismal failure. To give, they say, is more blessed than to
receive. It is certainly far easier, for the most part, to give than to
refrain from giving. We are at last shaking off the form, of
self-indulgence called charity; we realize that if mankind is to profit,
sterner conceptions must prevail. The apotheosis of the god-favoured
loafer is drawing to a close.
For the rest, there was the inevitable admixture of quackery about our
reforming sage; his warmest admirers cannot but admit that he savours
somewhat strongly of the holy impostor. Those charms and amulets, those
dark gnomic aphorisms which constitute the stock-in-trade of all
religious cheap-jacks, the bribe of future life, the sacerdotal tinge
with its complement of mendacity, the secrecy of doctrine, the
pretentiously-mysterious self-retirement, the "sacred quaternion," the
bean-humbug . . .
He had the true maraboutic note.
And for me, this regenerator crowned with a saintly aureole remains a
glorified marabout - an intellectual dissolvent; the importer of that
oriental introspectiveness which culminated in the idly-splendid
yearnings of Plato, paved the way for the quaint Alexandrian
tutti-frutti known as Christianity, and tainted the well-springs of
honest research for two thousand years. By their works ye shall known
them. It was the Pythagoreans who, not content with a just victory over
the Sybarites, annihilated their city amid anathemas worthy of those old
Chaldeans (past masters in the art of pious cursings); a crime against
their common traditions and common interests; a piece of savagery which
wrecked Hellenic civilization in Italy. It is ever thus, when the soul
is appointed arbiter over reason. It is ever thus, when gentle,
god-fearing dreamers meddle with worldly affairs. Beware of the wrath of
the lamb!
So rapidly did the virus act, that soon we find Plato declaring that all
the useful arts are degrading; that "so long as a man tries to study
any sensible object, he can never be said to be learning anything"; in
other words, that the kind of person to whom one looks for common sense
should be excluded from the management of his most refined republic. It
needed courage of a rather droll kind to make such propositions in
Greece, under the shadow of the Parthenon. And hand in hand with this
feudalism in philosophy there began that unhealthy preoccupation with
the morals of our fellow-creatures, that miasma of puritanism, which has
infected life and literature up to this moment.
The Renaissance brought many fine things to England. But the wicked
fairy was there with her gift: Pythagoras and Plato. We were not like
the Italians who, after the first rapture of discovery was over, soon
outgrew these distracted dialectics; we stuck fast in them. Hence our
Platonic touch: our demi-vierge attitude in matters of the mind, our
academic horror of clean thinking. How Plato hated a fact! He could
find no place for it in his twilight world of abstractions. Was it not
he who wished to burn the works of Democritus of Abdera, most exact and
reasonable of old sages?
They are all alike, these humanitarian lovers of first causes. Always
ready to burn something, or somebody; always ready with their cheerful
Hell-fire and gnashing of teeth.
Know thyself: to what depths of vain, egocentric brooding has that
dictum led! But we are discarding, now, such a mischievously narrow view
of the Cosmos, though our upbringing is still too rhetorical and
mediaeval to appraise its authors at their true worth. Youth is prone to
judge with the heart rather than the head; youth thrives on vaporous
ideas, and there was a time when I would have yielded to none in my
enthusiasm for these mellifluous babblers; one had a blind, sentimental
regard for their great names.
