Introduction to the Esoteric Doctrine - The Great Initiates - Édouard Schuré (original) (raw)

INTRODUCTION
TO THE
ESOTERIC DOCTRINE

I am convinced that a day will come when the physiologist, the poet and the philosopher will speak the same language and will all agree.
Claude Bernard

The greatest evil of our time is that Science and Religion appear there as two enemies and irreducible forces. Intellectual evil, which is all the more pernicious because it comes from above and infiltrates dully, but surely, in all minds, like a subtle poison that is breathed in the air. Now every evil of the intellect becomes, in the long run, an evil of the soul, and consequently a social evil.

So long as Christianity merely asserted the Christian faith naively in the midst of a Europe still half barbarous, as in the Middle Ages, it was the greatest of moral forces; he formed the soul of modern man. As long as experimental science, openly reconstituted in the sixteenth century, made claim to the legitimate rights of reason and its unlimited freedom, it was the greatest intellectual force; it has renewed the face of the world, freed man from secular chains and supplied to the human mind indestructible bases.

But since the Church, being no longer able to prove her primary dogma in the face of the objections of science, has shut itself up as in a house without windows, opposing faith to reason as an absolute and indisputable commandment; since science, intoxicated by its discoveries in the physical world, abstracting from the psychic and intellectual world, has become agnostic in its method, materialistic in its principles as in its end; since Philosophy, disoriented and impotent between the two, has in a way abdicated its rights to fall into a transcendent skepticism, a profound division has taken place in the soul of society as well as in that of individuals. This conflict, at first necessary and useful, since it established the rights of Reason and Science, ended up becoming a cause of helplessness and desiccation. Religion responds to the needs of the heart; hence his eternal magic; Science to those of the mind, hence its invincible force. But these powers have long ceased to know each other. Religion without proof and Science without hope are standing, one in front of the other, and defy without being able to conquer.

Hence a profound contradiction, a hidden war, not only between the State and the Church, but also in Science itself, in the bosom of all churches, and even in the consciousness of all thinking individuals. For whoever we are, at whatever philosophical, aesthetic, and social school we belong, we carry within ourselves those two seemingly irreconcilable enemy worlds which arise from two indestructible needs of man: scientific need and religious need. This situation, which has lasted for more than a hundred years, has certainly contributed little to develop the human faculties by tending them against each other. She has inspired poetry and music with the accents of a pathetic and grandiose unheard. But today, prolonged and hyperacute tension has produced the opposite effect. As the abatement succeeds the fever in a sick man, it has become a disastrous, disgusting, impotent state. Science only deals with the physical and material world; moral philosophy has lost the direction of intelligences; Religion still governs to a certain extent the masses, but it no longer reigns over social summits; always great by charity, it no longer radiates by faith. The intellectual guides of our time are unbelievers or skeptics perfectly sincere and loyal. But they doubt their art and look at each other with a smile like the Roman augurs. In public, in private, they predict social catastrophes without finding the remedy, or envelop their dark oracles with cautious euphemisms. Under such auspices, literature and art have lost the sense of the divine. Unaccustomed to eternal horizons, much of youth has poured into what its new masters call naturalism, thus degrading the beautiful name of Nature. For what they decorate with this word is only the apology of the low instincts, the mire of vice or the complacent painting of our social platitudes, in a word, the systematic negation of the soul and the intelligence. And the poor Psyche having lost her wings moaned and sighed strangely in the depths of the very people who insult and deny her.

By dint of materialism, positivism and skepticism, this end of the century has come to a false idea of Truth and Progress.

Our scholars, who practice the experimental method of Bacon for the study of the visible universe with marvelous precision and admirable results, make of the Truth an entirely external and material idea. They think that one gets closer to it as one accumulates a greater number of facts. In their field, they are right. What is serious is that our philosophers and moralists have ended by thinking the same. In this respect it is certain that the first causes and the last ends will remain forever impenetrable to the human mind. For, suppose that we know exactly what happens, materially speaking, in all the planets of the solar system, which, by the way, would be a magnificent basis of induction; suppose we know what kind of inhabitants contain the satellites of Sirius and several stars of the Milky Way. Certainly, it would be wonderful to know all this, but would we know more about the totality of our Stellar cluster, not to mention the nebula Andromeda and the cloud of Magellan? - This makes our time conceive the development of humanity as the eternal march towards an indefinite, indefinable and forever inaccessible truth.

This is the conception of the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer that prevailed today.

Now Truth was quite different from the sages and theosophists of the East and Greece. They knew, no doubt, that they could not be embraced and balanced without a summary knowledge of the physical world, but they also knew that it resided above all in ourselves, in the intellectual principles and in the spiritual life of the soul. For them, the soul was the only one, the divine reality and the key of the universe. By picking up their will to its center, by developing its latent faculties, they attained to that living hearth which they called God, whose light makes people and beings understand. For them, what we call Progress, namely the history of the world and of men, was but the evolution in time and space of this Central Cause and this Last End. And you may think that these theosophists were pure contemplatives, impotent dreamers, fakirs perched on their columns? Error, the world has not known greater men of action, in the most fruitful and incalculable sense of the word. They shine like stars of the first magnitude in the heaven of souls. They are called: Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Hermes, Moses, Pythagoras, Jesus, and they were powerful masters of spirits, formidable awakeners of souls, beneficial organizers of societies. Living only for their idea, ready to die, and knowing that death for Truth is the most effective and supreme action, they have created the sciences and religions, and consequently the letters and arts whose juice still nourishes us and makes us live. And what is positivism and skepticism producing nowadays? A dry generation, without an ideal, without light and without faith, believing neither in the soul nor in God, nor in the future of humanity, neither in this life nor in the other, without energy in the will, Doubting of itself and of human freedom.

“By their fruits you will judge them,” Jesus said. This word of the Master of the Teachers applies to doctrines as to men. Yes; this thought is necessary: either truth is forever inaccessible to man, or it has been possessed to a large extent by the greatest sages and initiators of the earth. It is therefore at the bottom of all the great religions and in the sacred books of all peoples. But you must know how to find and find it there.

If one looks at the history of religions with eyes opened by this central truth which only inner initiation can give, one remains at once surprised and amazed. What one sees then hardly resembles what the Church teaches which limits revelation to Christianity and admits it only in its primary sense. But it does not resemble what science teaches purely naturalistic in our University. The latter, however, takes a wider view. It puts all religions on the same line and applies to them a unique method of investigation. His erudition is profound, his zeal admirable, but it has not yet arisen from the point of view of comparative esotericism, which shows the history of religions and humanity in an entirely new aspect. From this height, this is what we perceive:

All the great religions have an external history and an inner history; one apparent, the other hidden. By external history, I mean the dogmas and myths taught publicly in temples and schools, recognized in popular worship and superstition. By internal history I mean the profound science, the secret doctrine, the occult action of the great initiates, prophets, or reformers who have created, sustained, propagated these same religions. The first, official history, that which is read everywhere, happens in broad daylight; it is nonetheless obscure, confused, contradictory. The second, which I call the esoteric tradition or the doctrine of the Mysteries, is very difficult to disentangle. For it takes place in the depths of the temples, in the secret brotherhoods, and its most striking dramas unfold entirely in the souls of the great prophets, who have entrusted no parchment or disciple with their supreme crises, divine ecstasies. We must guess it. But once it is seen, it appears luminous, organic, always in harmony with itself. It could also be called the history of eternal and universal religion. In it is revealed the bottom of things, the place of human consciousness, of which history offers only the laborious side. Here we grasp the generative point of Religion and Philosophy, the other end of the ellipse of integral science. This point corresponds to the transcendent truths. We find in it the cause, the origin, and the end of the prodigious work of ages, Providence in its terrestrial agents. This story is the only one I have dealt with in this book.

For the Aryan race, the germ and the nucleus are found in the Vedas. His first historical crystallization appears in the Trinitarian doctrine of Krishna, which gives Brahmanism its power, to the religion of India its indelible stamp. Buddha, which according to the chronology of the Brahmans would be posterior to Krishna by two thousand four hundred years, merely sets apart another side of the occult doctrine, that of metempsychosis and the series of existences chained by the law of Karma. Although Buddhism was a democratic, social and moral revolution against aristocratic and sacerdotal brahmanism, its metaphysical basis is the same but less complete.

The antiquity of the sacred doctrine is no less striking in Egypt, whose traditions date back to a civilization much earlier than the appearance of the Aryan race on the stage of history. It was permissible to suppose until lately that the Trinitarian monism expounded in the Greek books of Hermes Trismegistus was a compilation of the school of Alexandria under the double influence of Judeo-Christianity and neo-Platonism. By common consent, believers or unbelievers, historians and theologians have not ceased to affirm it to this day. Now, this theory falls today in front of the discoveries of the Egyptian epigraphy. The fundamental authenticity of the books of Hermes as documents of the ancient wisdom of Egypt, emerges triumphant from the hieroglyphics explained. Not only do the inscriptions of the steles of Thebes and Memphis confirm the entire chronology of Manetho, but they show that the priests of Ammon-Ra professed the high metaphysics which was taught in other forms on the banks of the Ganges1). One can say here with the Hebrew prophet that the stone speaks and the wall utters its cry. For, like the “midnight sun” which, it is said, shone in the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, the thought of Hermes, the ancient doctrine of the solar verb was rekindled in the tombs of the Kings and shines even on the papyri of the Book of the Dead, guarded by mummies of four thousand years.

En Grèce, la pensée ésotérique est à la fois plus visible et plus enveloppée qu’ailleurs ; plus visible, parce qu’elle se joue à travers une mythologie humaine et ravissante, parce qu’elle coule comme un sang ambrosien dans les veines de cette civilisation, et jaillit par tous les pores de ses Dieux comme un parfum et comme une rosée céleste. D’autre part, la pensée profonde et scientifique, qui présida à la conception de tous ces mythes, est souvent plus difficile à pénétrer à cause de leur séduction même et des embellissements qu’y ont ajoutés les poètes. Mais les principes sublimes de la théosophie dorienne et de la sagesse delphique sont inscrits en lettres d’or dans les fragments orphiques et dans la synthèse pythagoricienne ; non moins que dans la vulgarisation dialectique et peu, fantaisiste de Platon. L’école d’Alexandrie, enfin nous fournit des clefs utiles. Car elle fut la première à publier en partie et à commenter le sens, des mystères, au milieu du relâchement de la religion grecque et en face du christianisme grandissant.

In Greece, esoteric thought is at once more visible and more enveloped than elsewhere; more visible, because it is played through a human and ravishing mythology, because it flows like an Ambrosian blood in the veins of this civilization, and springs through all the pores of its gods like a perfume and like a celestial dew. On the other hand, the profound and scientific thought, which presided over the conception of all these myths, is often more difficult to penetrate because of their very seduction and the embellishments added by the poets. But the sublime principles of Dorian theosophy and of Delphic wisdom are written in gold letters in the Orphic fragments and in the Pythagorean synthesis; no less than in the dialectical vulgarization and little, fanciful Plato. The school of Alexandria, at last, furnishes us with useful keys. For it was the first to publish in part and to comment on the meaning of the mysteries in the midst of the relaxation of the Greek religion and in the face of growing Christianity.

As for Christian esotericism, it radiates itself in the Gospels enlightened by the Essenian and Gnostic traditions. It springs forth as a living source of the word of Christ, its parables, from the very depths of this incomparable, truly divine soul. At the same time the Gospel of St. John gives us the key to the intimate and superior teaching of Jesus with the meaning and scope of his promise. Here we find again this doctrine of the Trinity and the Divine Word already taught for thousands of years in the temples of Egypt and India, but endeavoured, personified by the prince of the initiated, by the greatest of the sons of God.

The application of the method which I have called esotericism in comparison with the history of religions leads us to a result of great importance, which is summed up as follows: antiquity, continuity and the essential unity of the esoteric doctrine. It must be acknowledged that this is a remarkable fact. For it presupposes that the wise men and prophets of the most diverse times have arrived at identical conclusions for the substance, though different in form, on the first and last truths - and this always by the same way of inner initiation and Of meditation. Let us add that these sages and prophets were the greatest benefactors of humanity, saviors whose redemptive power snatched men from the abyss of inferior nature and negation.

Is it not then to be said that there is, according to Leibnitz's expression, a kind of eternal philosophy, perennis quædam philosophia, which constitutes the primordial link of science and religion and their final unity?

The ancient theosophy professed in India; Egypt and Greece constituted a genuine encyclopedia, divided generally into four categories: - Theogony or science of absolute principles, identical with the science of Numbers applied, to the universe, or sacred mathematics; - Cosmogony, realization of eternal principles in space and time, or involution of spirit in matter; Periods of the world; - Psychology ; The constitution of man; evolution of the soul through the chain of existences; - Physics , science of the reigns of terrestrial nature and its properties. The inductive method and the experimental method were combined and controlled by each other in these various orders of science, and each of them corresponded to an art.

It was by taking them in the reverse order, and beginning with the physical sciences: - a Special Medicine based on knowledge of the occult properties of minerals, plants and animals; Alchemy or transmutation of metals, disintegration and reintegration of matter by the universal agent, art practiced in ancient Egypt according to Olympiodorus and named by him chrysopoeia and argyropoeia, manufacture of gold and silver; - Psychic Arts corresponding to the forces of the soul: magic and divination; - The Celestial Genethiac or astrology, or the art of discovering the relation between the destinies of peoples or individuals and the movements of the universe marked by the revolutions of the stars; - Theurgy, the supreme art of the Magus, as rare as perilous and difficult, reluctant to put the soul in conscious relationship with the various orders of spirits and to act on them.

We see that science and the arts were all in this theosophy and derived from the same principle which I shall call in modern language intellectual monism, evolutionary and transcendental spiritualism. The essential principles of the esoteric doctrine may be formulated as follows: - Mind is the only reality. Matter is only its inferior, changing, ephemeral expression, its dynamism in space and time. — Creation is eternal and continuous as life. The microcosm-man is, by its ternary constitution (mind, soul and body) the image and mirror of the macrocosm-universe (divine, human and natural world), which is itself the organ of the ineffable God, the absolute spirit, which is by its nature Father, Mother and Son (essence, substance and life). — That is why man, the image of God, can become his living word. Gnosis or the rational mysticism of all times is the art of finding God in itself by developing the occult depths, the latent faculties of consciousness. — The human soul, individuality, is immortal in essence. Its development takes place on a plane in turn descending and ascending, by alternately spiritual and corporeal existences. — Reincarnation is the law of its evolution. Having reached its perfection, it escapes it and returns to the pure Spirit, to God in the fullness of his conscience. Just as the soul rises above the law of the struggle for life when it becomes conscious of its humanity, so it rises above the law of reincarnation when it becomes conscious of His divinity.

The prospects open to the threshold of theosophy are immense, especially when compared with the narrow and desolate horizon where materialism encloses man, or the childish and unacceptable data of clerical theology. On seeing them for the first time, one experiences the dazzling, the thrill of the infinite. The abysses of the Unconscious open themselves to us, show us the abyss from which we emerge, the vertiginous heights where we aspire. Delighted with this immensity, but appalled at the journey, we ask not to be; we call on Nirvana! Then we perceive that this weakness is but the lassitude of the sailor ready to let go the oar in the midst of the squall. Someone said: man is born in a hollow of a wave and knows nothing of the vast ocean that stretches back and forth. This is true; but the transcendent mystic is pushing our bark on the crest of a blade, and there, always beaten by the fury of the tempest, we catch its grandiose rhythm; and the eye measuring the vault of heaven, rests in the calm of the azure.

Surprise increases, if, returning to modern science, we observe that since Bacon and Descartes, they tend involuntarily, but all the more surely, to return to the data of ancient theosophy. Without abandoning the hypothesis of atoms, modern physics has come to insensibly identify the idea of matter with the idea of force, which is a step towards spiritualist dynamism. In order to explain light, magnetism, electricity, scientists must have admitted a subtle and absolutely imponderable matter, filling space and penetrating all bodies, a matter which they have called ether, Antique theosophical idea of the soul of the world. As for the impressionability and the intelligible docility of this matter, it emerges from a recent experiment which proves the transmission of sound by light2). Of all the sciences, those which seem to have the most compromised spiritualism, are comparative zoology and anthropology. In reality, they will have served it, by showing the law and the mode of intervention of the intelligible world in the animal world. Darwin put an end to the childish idea of creation according to primary theology. In this respect he has only returned to the ideas of ancient theosophy. Pythagoras had already said, “Man is the kinsman of the animal.” Darwin has shown the laws which nature obeys to execute the divine plan, the instrumental laws which are: the struggle for life, heredity, and natural selection. He has proved the variability of species, he has reduced the number of them, he has established the low water. But his disciples, the theorists of absolute transformism who wished to bring all species out of a single prototype and make their appearance depend on the only influences of the environments, forced the facts in favor of a purely external and materialist conception of nature. No, the environments do not explain species, nor do physical laws explain chemical laws, nor does chemistry explain the evolutionary principle of the plant, nor the evolutionary principle of animals. As for the great families of animals, they correspond to the eternal types of life, signatures of the Spirit, which mark the scale of consciousness. The appearance of mammals after reptiles and birds has no reason for a change in the terrestrial environment; this is only the condition. It presupposes a new embryogeny; and consequently a new intellectual and animistic force acting through the inner and the bottom of nature, which we call the beyond in relation to the perception of the senses. Without this intellectual and animistic force one would not even explain the appearance of an organized cell in the inorganic world. Finally, Man, who summarizes and crowns the series of beings, reveals all divine thought by the harmony of the organs and the perfection of form; the living effigy of the Universal Soul, Activated Intelligence. Condensing all the laws of evolution and all nature in his body, he dominates and elevates himself above it, to enter through the consciousness and freedom into the infinite kingdom of the Spirit.

Experimental psychology, based on physiology, which has since become a science since the beginning of the century, has led contemporary scholars to the threshold of another world, the proper world of the soul, where, without analogies ceasing , Reign new laws. I hear of the studies and medical findings of this century on animal magnetism; On somnambulism and on all the states of the soul different from the previous day, from lucid sleep through double vision to ecstasy. Modern science has only yet groped in this field, where the science of the ancient temples had been able to orientate itself, because it possessed the necessary principles and keys. It is none the less true that she discovered a whole series of facts which seemed to her astonishing, marvelous, inexplicable, because they clearly contradicted the materialistic theories under which she became accustomed to Think and experiment. Nothing is more instructive than the indignant incredulity of certain materialistic scholars before all the phenomena which tend to prove the existence of an invisible and spiritual world. Today, somebody who feels himself to prove the soul scandalizes the orthodoxy of atheism, as much as the orthodoxy of the Church was once scandalized by denying God. One does not risk his life anymore, it is true, but one risks his reputation. Whatever it may be, what emerges from the simplest phenomenon of mental suggestion at a distance, and by that pure thought, a phenomenon which has been repeated a thousand times in the annals of magnetism3). It is a mode of action of the mind and the will outside the physical laws and the visible world. The door of the Invisible is therefore open. In the high phenomena of somnambulism, this world opens altogether. But here I stop at what is found by official science.

If we pass from experimental and objective psychology to the intimate and subjective psychology of our time, which is expressed in poetry, music and literature, we shall find that an immense breath of unconscious esotericism crosses them. Never has the aspiration to life, the invisible world repressed by the materialistic theories of scientists and worldly opinion, been more serious and real. One finds this aspiration in regrets, in doubts, in the black melancholies and even in the blasphemies of our naturalist novelists and our decadent poets. Never has the human soul had a deeper feeling of the insufficiency, of the misery, of the unreal of its present life, never has it ardently aspired the invisible beyond, believe. Sometimes even his intuition succeeds in formulating transcendent truths which are not part of the system admitted by his reason, which contradict his surface opinions, and which are involuntary effulgations of his occult consciousness. I will cite as proof the passage of a rare thinker who tasted all the bitterness and all the moral solitude of this time. “Every sphere of being,” says Frédéric Amiel, “tends to a higher sphere and already has revelations and presentiments. The ideal, in all its forms, is the anticipation, the prophetic vision of this existence superior to its own, to which each being aspires always. This higher existence in dignity is more interior by its nature, that is, more spiritual. As volcanoes bring us the secrets of the interior of the globe, enthusiasm and ecstasy are passing explosions of this inner world of the soul, and human life is nothing but preparation and advent to it Spiritual life. The degrees of initiation are innumerable. Thus watch, a disciple of life, a chrysalis of an angel, works at your future blossoming, for the Divine Odyssey is only a series of more ethereal metamorphoses, in which each form, as a result of the preceding ones, is the Condition of those that follow. The divine life is a series of successive deaths in which the mind rejects its imperfections and its symbols and yields to the growing attraction of the center of ineffable gravitation, the sun of intelligence and love.” Usually Amiel was only a very intelligent Hegelian, with a superior moralist. The day he wrote these inspired lines, he was profoundly theosophical. For the very essence of esoteric truth can not be expressed in a more striking and more luminous manner.

These insights are enough to show that modern science and the mind are preparing without knowing and unwillingly for a reconstruction of ancient theosophy with more precise instruments and on a more solid foundation. According to the word of Lamartine, mankind is a weaver who works back in the fabric of time. A day will come, when passing on the other side of the canvas, she will contemplate the magnificent and grandiose picture which she has woven for centuries with her own hands, without seeing anything but the jumble of threads entangled in the reverse. That day she will salute Providence manifested in herself. Then the words of a contemporary hermetic writing will be confirmed, and they will not seem too audacious to those who have penetrated deep enough into occult traditions to suspect their marvelous unity: “Esoteric doctrine is not only a science, a philosophy, a morality, a religion. It is the science, the philosophy, the morality and the religion, of which all the others are only preparations or degenerations, partial or false expressions, according to Whether conveyed or diverted.”((The perfect way of finding Christ, by Anna Kingsford and Maillaud. London, 1882.)

Far be it from me the vain thought of having given this science of the sciences a complete demonstration. The edifice of the known and unknown sciences, reconstituted in their hierarchical framework and reorganized in the spirit of esotericism, would be no less necessary. All I hope I have proved is that the doctrine of the Mysteries is the source of our civilization; that it has created the great religions, both Aryan and Semitic; that Christianity leads the entire human race by its esoteric reserve, and that modern science tends providentially by the whole of its course; finally, they must meet there as a junction and find their synthesis.

It may be said that wherever any fragment of the esoteric doctrine is found, it exists virtually in its entirety. For each of its parts presupposes or engenders the others. The great sages, the true prophets, have all possessed it, and those of the future will possess it as the will of the past. The light may be more or less intense; but it is always the same light shape, details, applications can vary to infinity; the bottom, that is, the principles, and the end, never. In these books there will be found a kind of gradual development, of successive revelation of the doctrine in its various parts, and this through the great initiates, each of whom represents one of the great religions which have contributed to the constitution Of the present humanity, and whose sequel marks the line of evolution described by it in the present cycle, from ancient Egypt and the early Aryan times. It will therefore be seen coming forth not from an abstract and scholastic exposition, but from the melting soul of these great inspired, and from the living action of history.

In this series, Rama shows only the surroundings of the temple. Krishna and Hermes give the key. Moses, Orpheus, and Pythagoras show the interior. Jesus Christ represents the sanctuary.

This book has emerged from a burning thirst for truth, a superior, total, eternal truth, without which partial truths are only a delusion. They will understand me, who have, like me, the consciousness that the present moment of history, with its material riches, is but a sad desert from the point of view of the soul and its immortal aspirations. The hour is the most serious, and the extreme consequences of agnosticism begin, to be felt by social disorganization. For France and Europe, it is a matter of being or of not being. It is a question of establishing on their indestructible bases the central, organic truths or of definitively pouring into the abyss of materialism and anarchy.

Science and Religion, these guardians of civilization, have lost both their supreme gift, their magic, that of great and strong education. The temples of India and Egypt produced the greatest sages of the earth. The Greek temples molded heroes and poets. The apostles of Christ were sublime martyrs and brought forth thousands. The Church of the Middle Ages, in spite of her primary theology, made saints and knights, because she believed and, bumpily, the spirit of Christ was in her. Today neither the Church imprisoned in its dogma nor the Science enclosed in matter can no longer make men complete. The art of creating and forming souls is lost and will be found only when Science and Religion, recast in a living force, will apply themselves together and in common accord for the good and salvation of humanity. In order to do this, Science would not have to change its method, but to extend its domain, nor traditional Christianity, but to understand its origins, spirit and scope.

This time of intellectual regeneration and social transformation will come, we are sure. Already certain omens announce it. When Science knows, Religion will be able, and Man will act with new energy. The Art of life and all the arts can only be revived by their agreement.

But in the meantime, what should we do at the end of the century, which resembles the descent into a gulf, by a menacing twilight, when its beginning seemed to rise to the free summits under a brilliant dawn? “Faith,” said a great doctor, “is the courage of the spirit that rushes forward, sure of finding the truth. This faith is not the enemy of reason, but its torch; It is that of Christopher Columbus and Galileo, who wants proof and counterproof, provando e riprovando, and it is the only possible today.

For those who have irrevocably lost it, and there are many of them - for example, the example has come from above, the road is easy and marked out: - to follow the current of the day, to undergo one century instead of fighting against it, doubt or negation, to console oneself for all human misery and the next cataclysms with a smile of disdain, and to cover the profound nothingness of things - to which only one is believed - of a brilliant veil decorated with the beautiful name of ideal - while thinking that it is only a useful chimera.

As for us, poor lost children, who believe that the Ideal is the only Reality and the only Truth in the midst of a changing and fugitive world, who believe in the sanction and the fulfillment of its promises in history of humanity as in the future life, who know that this sanction is necessary, that it is the reward of human brotherhood, as the reason of the universe and the logic of God; - for us, who have this conviction, there is only one course to be taken: Let us affirm this Truth without fear and as high as possible; let us throw ourselves for it and with it into the arena of action, and above this confused fray, let us try to penetrate through meditation and individual initiation into the Temple of Immutable Ideas, to arm ourselves with unbreakable Principles.

This is what I have tried to do in this book, hoping that others will follow me and do it better than I do.