irected to such arrangements of measures and numbers
in nature. Geometrical figures also play a similar role. Astronomy,
for instance, is mathematics applied to the heavenly bodies. One fact
became important to the thought-life of the Pythagoreans. This was
that man, quite alone and purely through his mental activity,
discovers the laws of numbers and figures, and yet, that when he looks
abroad into nature, he finds that things are obeying the same laws
which he has ascertained for himself in his own mind. Man forms the
idea of an ellipse, and ascertains the laws of ellipses. And the
heavenly bodies move according to the laws which he has established.
(It is not, of course, a question here of the astronomical views of
the Pythagoreans. What may be said about these may equally be said of
Copernican views in the connection now being dealt with.) Hence it
follows as a direct consequence that the achievements of the human
soul are not an activity apart from the rest of the world, but that in
those achievements the cosmic laws are expressed. The Pythagoreans
said: "The senses show man physical phenomena, but they do not show
the harmonious order which these things follow." The human mind must
first find that harmonious order within itself, if it wishes to behold
it in the outer world. The deeper meaning of the world, that which
bears sway within it as an eternal, law-obeying necessity, this makes
its appearance in the human soul and becomes a present reality there.
THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE IS REVEALED in the soul. This meaning is
not to be found in what we see, hear, and touch, but in what the soul
brings up to the light from its own unseen depths. The eternal laws
are thus hidden in the depths of the soul. If we descend there, we
shall find the Eternal. God, the eternal harmony of the world, is in
the human soul. The soul-element is not limited to the bodily
substance which is enclosed within the skin, for what is born in the
soul is nothing less than the laws by which worlds revolve in
celestial space. The soul is not in the personality. The personality
only serves as the organ through which the order which pervades cosmic
space may express itself. There is something of the spirit of
Pythagoras in what one of the Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, said: "It is
said that human nature is something small and limited, and that God is
infinite, and it is asked how the finite can embrace the infinite. But
who dares to say that the inf