nothing, and that all that has been said of the esoterism and the mysteries of Chaldea is based merely upon legends or writings that are notoriously apocryphal.

CHAPTER VI

GREECE BEFORE SOCRATES

T

I

O complete this brief survey of the primitive religions-this inquiry into the origins of the Great Secret-we must not overlook the pre-Socratic theogony.

Before the classic period the Greek philosophers, of whose works we possess only mutilated fragments-Pythagoras, Petronius Hippasus, Xenophanes, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Alcmæon, Parmenides of Elea, Leucippus, Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, -were already in the ridiculous and uncomfortable situation in which the Hebrew cabalists and the occultists of the middle ages found themselves about fifteen to twenty centuries later. They seem, like the latter, to have had a presentiment of the existence, or the dim tradition, of a religion more ancient and of a nobler character than their own, which had replied, or had endeavored to reply, to all the anxious questions as to divinity, the origin and the purpose of the world, eternal Becoming and impassive Being; the passage from chaos to the cosmos; the emergence from the vast

sum of things and the return thereto; spirit and substance, good and evil; the birth of the universe and its end; attraction and repulsion; fate; man's place in the universe and his destiny.

Above all, this lost tradition, which we found in India all but intact, marks once for all the divorce between the knowable and the unknowable; and, attributing the lion's share to the latter, it had the courage to implant in the very heart of its doctrine a tremendous confession of ignorance.

But the Greeks do not seem to have realized the existence of this confession, simple, definite, and profound though it was, albeit it would have saved them a great deal of vain inquiry; or else, their intellect-subtle, more active, more enterprising than ours-was unwilling to admit it; and all their cosmogony, their theogony, and their metaphysics are merely an incessant endeavor to belittle it, by subdividing it, by triturating it ad infinitum, as though they hoped that, by dint of diminishing each separate particle of the unknowable, they would eventually succeed in learning all about it.

What a curious spectacle it is, that of this contest of the Greek intellect-lucid, exacting, fidgety, eager to obtain a clear idea of everything with the imposing though often extravagant obscurities of the Asiatic religions! It

has been said that the Greeks had no conception of the divine Absolute; and this is true, but of a later period. In the beginning their conceptions, as yet under the influence of mysterious traditions, were completely permeated by this sense of the Absolute, which had often led them, by the paths of reason alone, far higher, and perhaps nearer to the truth, than their more capable successors who had lost it.

2

But without speaking in detail of their gropings after a light of which they had some vague intuition, or which was buried deep in the ancestral memory or in myths which were no longer understood; without specifying the contribution of each of the Greek philosophers, which would involve explanations interesting enough but of disproportionate length, we shall merely note the essential points of agreement with the Vedic and Brahman theories.

Xenophanes the first, unlike the poets, affirmed the existence of a sole, immutable, and eternal god. "God," he said, "is not born, for He could not be born save of His like, or of His contrary; two hypotheses of which the first is futile, and the second absurd. One cannot call Him infinite, nor yet finite; for if infinite, having neither middle nor beginning nor end, He would be nothing at all; and if finite He

would be encompassed by limitations and would cease to be One. For like reasons He is neither at rest nor in movement. In short, one cannot attribute to Him any characteristics but negative ones." 1 This is really tantamount to admitting, in other words, that He is as unknowable as the First Cause of the Hindus.

This acceptance of the Unknowable is more clearly formulated by Xenophanes in another passage:

"No one understands, no one ever will understand, the truth concerning the gods and the things which I teach. If any one did happen to come upon the absolute truth he would never be aware of the encounter. Nowhere do we find anything more than probability."

Might we not repeat to-day what the founder of the Eleatic school affirmed more than twenty-five centuries ago? Was there, here, as elsewhere, an infiltration of the primitive tradition? It is probable; in any case, the filiation is clearly proved in other particulars. The Orphics whom we find at the legendary and prehistoric source of Hellenic poetry and philosophy were really, according to Herodotus, Egyptians.2 We have seen, on the other hand, that the Egyptian religion and the Vedic religion have probably a common origin, and

1 Albert Rivaud, Le Problème du Devinir; p. 102. 2 Herodotus; II, 81.