Pythagorean fancies

PORTAR Bas PYTHAGOREAN BY : C la FANCIES. H The Canadian Magaz: 1—A DAY-DREAM OF IMMORTALITY, A p.16 the waters are like veins in other animate beings, and that metals are even A GENERAL belief must have a foun- now being sorted out from their solu: dation in fact. Who has not heard of the wide-spread traditions, among all tions and deposited in certain layers, even as flesh and bone are being creraces, of a deluge, and of the argument ated and re-created in the organic — therefrom in favor of the ark, or of the curious precocity of children, who utter thoughts they can hardly have derived from their surroundings, but bodies all around us.” “You are still busy upon the old — problem,” he replied. “I knew it, for I see the impress of recent as well as seem like reminiscences of a former former thoughts upon your brain. They are like assorted photographs, life ? The writer had some coins melted in a crucible, and poured into an ingot mould. On the paper-weight before him, the old coats of arms are traceable; the image and superseription is not quite effaced. Is it more difficult for the soul to retain consciousness of a prior incarnation, after passing through the alembic of the tomb, than for minted metal to keep the impress of the die after seething in the furnace of the smelter ? Dreaming thus of the analogies of the material and immaterial worlds —quasi verities, sophistries, I know not what—a shape stood there before me of aman with whom on such subjects I had oftentimes conversed. As I had known him he appeared, not with unearthly pallor, diaphanous drapery or flowing beard, but with clear complexion and the warm, fresh color of life, though his body had long been resting in an honored grave. His well-fitting dress showed the familiar bright strip of ribbon in the lapel, which testified to the enlightened appreciation of his attainments by a foreign government. “I was just thinking, Chevalier,” said I, “ of your theory that the earth and all-the worlds are living organand though yon can only examine them one by one, I perceive them all— an interesting panorama.” Our conversation began thus easily. I felt no wonder, no alarm. Indeed, I should have greeted him in life with more effusiveness, and taken the visit less as a matter of course. “I must rejoice,” he quietly continued, “in my power of observation and perception. I no longer merely think; I know. How I enjoy the expansion of view that dawns upon me!” This seemed a little eerie, so I roused myself and asked if he had found fresh proofs to support his theory of a living world. Only now did I become conscious that I was conversing with a soul no longer tied to mortal elements, and I muttered something about evidense— what evi dence of his old views could he now advance ? z “Evidence,” he smiled, “I want no evidence. I perceive; Iam convinced Iknow. Nothing seems to be; it is. My fancies, then, are now, in great ~ part, facts.” = I began to wonder why I was this honored with an interview; but before I could frame my question— isms. You were fond of saying that “Will power,” he broke in, as if anthe subterranean drainage channels of ticipating me—“ will power is the

PYTHAGOREAN FANCIES. cecret, first, last, and forever—the will mon ideas about disembodied spirits. of the unnumbered beings of which Can you really think it possible you consist and by which you are that a spirit sleeps or rests, hears, moved. You are not one; you are an sees, smells, feels or tastes? that, innumerable family of atoms, whose without organs, it moves, speaks, exYou think, perhaps, lives ave never extinguished, whose ercises force? you are now seeing a shape and hearloves are sempiternal.” It is to you an “Fine words,” I thought. “You ing a familiar voice. always liked sonorous vocables. But illusion ; you believe you see and hear, what on earth or in limbo can you but it is the stuff that dreams are made of. No spirit, among spirits, can need mean by the loves of a molecule ?” “Just what's meant,” said he, “ by or take work or repose; it must think the love, affection, wish, affinity—call on, think ever. Thus it must become it what you will—of human beings. Do not the particles of iron that escape in fumes from factory chimneys tind their way, by their volition, to mines, with other iron particles dissolved out of decaying mosses or become discrete by other means? There are, there must needs be, many stages in their journey,in which Time «carcely counts at all, but in the end they will be reunited in another bed of iron ore. From the ocean, that huge reservoir of all the salts, the various layers of land are, like sponges, soakin up seas of water, each choosing for assimilation its fitting element. Gold and silver are the chosen metals now which perhaps influence men, these parasites upon the surface of the globe, who think themselves all puissant, yet are no more than a sort of aearus upon its crust. Thus does the earth feed upon and constantly recreate or reconstitute itself. Thus does like ever seek out like, and aftinity rule the universe as well as the lives of men.” “You speak depreciatingly of men,” ra l. “That is curious, for you lil not lack for honors while among us. And how do you like being a disembodied soul ?” “I cannot tell,” was the unexpected answer. “This is my first experience vi the sensation. l infer and I can see, that is, know from your brain, that I have been some years separatel ins from you, but the years further are from blank. facts, interven- Nothing than the is comor be omniscient, or, at least, all-knowing along its allotted lines, if there be a limitation; even as the space between the lines which enclose an angle is infinite in one direction. Can such a spirit be possible, apart from Deity ? No. The soul must become an inseparable part of the divine essence; and what it must become, it has always been and is. Thus, all spirit can be but one. For a time, matter enthrals some portions, or, rather, emanations of the spirit are materialized. This function of the divine essence is called life, the inscrutable object of which who knows? When kindly death ends the existence of a being whose pains and weakness have made life undesirable, not only- does the bond of unity between soul and body end, but sentient existence, by which I mean that consciousness of being called independence, ends for both.” “How then came you here, you metaphysical thing?” I at once enquired, though, I suppose, I did not speak aloud, but thought I spoke. “You are brusque,” he said. “Let me proceed. I did not say existence would not reecmmence. There is a sum of spiritual essence as there is of matter. If you light a match the carbon burns, but in time it will return to be another pine, another saw-log, another match. So, too, with what I must call the particles of soul. Some will be wedded to or cause to be formed another body in another cycle, while in a great cycle, like that referred to by Cicero in his Dream of

THE CANADIAN MAGAZINE. Scipio, there will again be a very similar soul,—in short, the same spirit in a similar body: that is, a Resurrection.” “Your pardon, friend,” I cried. “How then come you here, the same in speech and figure as a dozen years The ago, and similar in thought? single cycle cannot be so short; the cycle of cycles must be almost an eternity !” “ Quite true,” quoth he. “You remember Virgil ‘Has omnes ubi mille rotam volvere per annos Lerneum ad flumen Deus evocat agmine magno. - Scilicet immemores supera ut convexa revisant, Rursus et incipiant in corpora nulle reverti.' “The bard well knew that a thousand years had to elapse before the souls wanted to return from hell to upper air. Am [here by my own wish? No, Your thoughts about my by yours. theories set up something like a point of crystallization, and, as in a chemical solution, a crystal forms, so on your thoughts my spiritual being has reA few moments ago I newed itself. I was not; you have re-created me. am; I think; I remember; I know. I am possessed of the knowledge of the present and the past, but I know that in a few moments I shall cease to be. Your wandering mind will no longer be a centre of compulsion, and no such combination of events as that which has permitted me for the time to exist again to you and to myself will ever recur.” “Ts this, then,” I asked, “the promised immortality ?” “Tmmortality ?” he cried. “How often must I repeat that all things are immortal; that immortality is but a phase of life, as life is but a phase of immortality. Does not the weed whose seeds are scattered to the winds again live, again feel the spring breeze fan its tender leaves, again unfold its petals -to the sun, ripen its seeds, and thus forever endure? Is not all life transmitted thus, ever nearing perfect adaptations? Ask the biologist if even his microscopic cells, ever sub-dividing, are not immortal ?” “I glimpse your reasoning,” I mused, “as in a glass, darkly. Strange that > a half unconscious effort of my memory should thus recall your spirit into being, re-unite or re-crystallize the par+ ticles of your soul. Memory is “Memory,” he whispered, or saggested (which it was. I cannot tell), “is the seed of life, nay, more, it alone is life. When I am forgotten, my name quite faded, I cannot be thus recalled to an unsatisfactory kind of ghostship, but I shall be free to live, in time, a new existence, and, under some other ~~ name, become a child again. Oh, happiness ineffable! New joys, new life, new friends: Old jealousies, hatreds, old musty knowledge gone! Yet some, ‘tis thought, remember, in the new existence, a little of the old, not having drunk of Lethe quite so deeply as the rest. Pythagoras felt that he had lived during the Trojan war, when he was—was it not Alectryón ?” “ Bother Pythagoras,” I blurted out, shaking my head, to clear my thoughts for some more queries. It was a fatal act. The vision faded slowly like a dissolving view upon a screen. Some motes in a sunbeam that had strayed into my study, alone marked the place where I had so distinctly seen my departed friend. II.—REAL AND IMAGINARY SOUNDS. I saw the shape; no doubt of that. An illusion it may have been, but I recall with certainty its color and form. When I think of the voice, I cannot be so sure. I understood it, but I cannot affirm that it was soft or hoarse, musical or noisy. Does any one hear voices in a dream? I cannot answer for myself, as yet. Can you—and you? Next time we dream let us try, at waking, to remember the sounds we suppose we heard. Meanwhile I hold that a dream is rightly called a vision, be-

PYTHAGOREAN FANCIES. cause imaginary sight is its sole char- other day.” Let us at least make a acteristic, the images being like mari- strategic movement tothe rear. Haul onettes, which move, suggest words, away. Down with your helm. Look but never even seem to utter any. Pantagruel and Panurge, with all their jolly party, are sent by Rabelais on a cruise, well out tosea. They are chatting and laughing, when up jumps Pantagruel (the son of Gargantua), and looking around, quite anxiously, “ Don't yon hear something ?” he asks. “T hear voices in the air, but I see nothing. Listen, all of you.” “And to the booms. Ware the lines —we are dead men else, By all the devils, let us be off 1°" Pantagruel, hearing all the outery, asked who the skulker was. “ For,” said he, “we ought first to find out who these people are. Perhaps they are our own folk. J can't see any one yet, though there must be a hundred thousand all around! I once read we listened,” says the historian, “lis- that a philosopher named Petronius tened with ears like the other half thought there were several worlds, shells of oysters, and we even put our touching one anotber like equilateral hands behind our ears, palms out- triangles, apex to apex, in the centre ward, as Emperor Antoninus used to of which was the dwelling of Truth, do. At first we could hear nothing where abode words, ideas, and the exat all, but, as Pantagruel said he heard emplars and portraits of all things something, we kept on, and finished past and future, while around them by doing the same. The longer we listened the more we heard, even to whole words, which alarmed us very much, and no wonder, for though we saw nothing we heard men shouting, women erying, and horses neighing and screaming, until Panurge cried, ‘Itis sorcery; we are lost. Let us sheer off! Friar John, my friend, stand by me. Have you yoursword ? Take care it does not stick on the sheath. (He triesit). That's not half drawn. We are lost, I say. Hark! There are cannon shots, by Jove! Let us sail away, row away, anything to get out of this. (I never have the least courage at sea, but lots of it in the cellar and other places.) Let us turn tail (not that I am afraid; I fear nothing but danger.) Let us be off Right about face. Turn the tiller, you son of a sea cow. Would to God I were on dry land, though I had to vow I'd be a bachelor all my life! Let us get off...we don’t belong to them. They are ten to our one, I assure you. They are on their own was the Cycle. In certain years, at long intervals, a portion of them fell upon the human race, as falls the influenza, or us fell the dew upon the fleece of Gideou, while other portions were reserved until the end of the cycle. I remember that Aristotle calls the words of Homer swift, leaping, flying; so they must beliving. Antiphanes, too, says Plato's doctrine of words js of the same kind, becanse in winter, in some countries, they are frozen as they are uttered, and not heard at all. hus Plato taught children things they could not understand until they grew old. We ought to philosophize and think if this is not the place where such words thaw out. Should we not be delighted if we found the head and the lyre of Orpheus, which the Thracian women, who tore that singer to bits, threw into the Hebrus, which floated them to the Black Sea and so on to Lesbos, and the head was always uttering a mournful chant, as if lamenting Orpheus’ death, while the lyre, among whose strings the winds were playing, made harmony for the song. Let us We need not be ashamed to run away, try to find them somewhere heredung-hill too; we don’t know the lie of the land, They will kill us, sure: beeanse, as says Demosthenes, ‘he who runs away may live to fight anabouts.” Find the Orphic lyre, indeed ! Since

THE CANADIAN MAGAZINE. the Thracian women destroyed the spirit of song, Orpheus has not been again incarnate. Scrawny females, in this or that conventicle, with their so-called hymns and anthems, are murdering him still. What absurdities we are guilty of, even in this nineteenth century, pandering in all things to the low average of the poor mass of us, instead of crying Excelsior, and aiming high. Our northern throats are raucous at their best, save now and then a Jenny Lind's or an Emma Juch’s, yet we permit such wretchedness as congregational singing. By Saint Cecilia, it is tough to have to endure the croaking of the poll, if one’s ears are at all attuned to softer melody and sweeter harmony ! What makes these folks take part in such a Brekekoax chorus? Not a bricklayer or grocer, not a barrister or doctor, can carry on his trade or calling without due apprenticeship, but every vulgar snob, under the pretence of worship, is allowed to mouth a travesty of music, and level things divine to the standard of a pot-house song. Small wonder that organs are in fashion, for they serve, like the drums and cymbals of a Turkish band, to drown a horrible din. “Hin, hin, hin, hin, his, tic, tac, brededin, brededac, frr, frrr, frrr, bon, bon, bon, trr, trr, trrr, on, on, on. on.” —such were the sounds they say they heard on Pantagruel’s ship: the noise of horses and the shock of a charge. They anticipated Professor Garner in his study of the language of monkeys and other animals, and that withouta phonograph. . Barbarians were the people who said “ Ba, ba, ba,” for speech. Why does not Garner visit our churches with his phonograph, instead of spending his energies in Africa ? Thracian women! Rabelais seems rightly to understand the Orphic myth. How could such melancholy folk appreciate true song? When a child was born to them, the relatives used to condole with (not congratulate) the parents; they would weep and howl] at the prospect of misery : that was before the infant, and would rejoice when a friend died, because he was delivered from the misfortune and wretchedness of life! Some of these Thracians were polygamists, and when the man died, the wives used to dispute which of them had been the best beloved, for she was privileged to slay herself on her husband's tomb. Herodotus (iv. 93), calls the best of them an ignorant lot. I wonder if the Serbs and Roumanians have had the Orphic murder sufficiently revenged-upon them, and if their hate bas yet turned to respectful love ?