[1] I here use the term with the extended meaning Mr H. G. WELLS has given to it.  See The New Machiavelli.

What could be more easy to understand than that, when man first questioned as to the creation of the earth, he should suppose it to have been generated by some process analogous to that which he saw held in the case of man?  How else could he account for its origin, if knowledge must proceed from the known to the unknown?  No one questions at all that the worship of the human generative organs as symbols of the dual generative principle of Nature degenerated into orgies of the most frightful character, but the view of Nature which thus degenerated is not, I think, an altogether unsound one, and very interesting remnants of it are to be found in mediaeval philosophy.

These remnants are very marked in alchemy.  The metals, as I have suggested, are there regarded as types of man; hence they are produced from seed, through the combination of male and female principles—­mercury and sulphur, which on the spiritual plane are intelligence and love.  The same is true of that Stone which is perfect Man.  As BERNARD of TREVISAN (1406-1490) wrote in the fifteenth century:  “This Stone then is compounded of a Body and Spirit, or of a volatile and fixed Substance, and that is therefore done, because nothing in the World can be generated and brought to light without these two Substances, to wit, a Male and Female:  From whence it appeareth, that although these two Substances are not of one and the same species, yet one Stone doth thence arise, and although they appear and are said to be two Substances, yet in truth it is but one, to wit, Argent-vive."[1] No doubt this sounds fantastic; but with all their seeming intellectual follies these old thinkers were no fools.  The fact of sex is the most fundamental fact of the universe, and is a spiritual and physical as well as a physiological fact.  I shall deal with the subject as concerns the speculations of the alchemists in some detail in a later excursion.

[1] BERNARD, Earl of TREVISAN:  A Treatise of the Philosopher’s Stone, 1683. (See Collectanea Chymica:  A Collection of Ten Several Treatises in Chemistry, 1684, p. 91.)

II

PYTHAGORAS AND HIS PHILOSOPHY

IT is a matter for enduring regret that so little is known to us concerning PYTHAGORAS.  What little we do know serves but to enhance for us the interest of the man and his philosophy, to make him, in many ways, the most attractive of Greek thinkers; and, basing our estimate on the extent of his influence on the thought of succeeding ages, we recognise in him one of the world’s master-minds.