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.
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