wo lives
was complete. One day when the master's wife was asked what length of
time elapsed before a woman could become pure after intercourse with a
man, she replied: 'If it is with her husband, she is pure all the time;
if with another man, she is never pure.'" "Many women," adds the writer,
"would smilingly remark that to give such a reply one must be the wife
of Pythagoras, and love him as Theano did. And they would be in the
right, for it is not marriage that sanctifies love, it is love which
justifies marriage."(1)

(1) EDOUARD SCHURE: _Pythagoras and the Delphic Mysteries_, trans. by F.
ROTHWELL, B.A. (1906), pp. 164 and 165.

PYTHAGORAS was not merely a mathematician, he was first and foremost a
philosopher, whose philosophy found in number the basis of all things,
because number, for him, alone possessed stability of relationship. As I
have remarked on a former occasion, "The theory that the Cosmos has its
origin and explanation in Number... is one for which it is not difficult
to account if we take into consideration the nature of the times in
which it was formulated. The Greek of the period, looking upon Nature,
beheld no picture of harmony, uniformity and fundamental unity. The
outer world appeared to him rather as a discordant chaos, the mere sport
and plaything of the gods. The theory of the uniformity of Nature--that
Nature is ever like to herself--the very essence of the modern
scientific spirit, had yet to be born of years of unwearied labour
and unceasing delving into Nature's innermost secrets. Only in
Mathematics--in the properties of geometrical figures, and of
numbers--was the reign of law, the principle of harmony, perceivable.
Even at this present day when the marvellous has become commonplace,
that property of right-angled triangles... already discussed... comes
to the mind as a remarkable and notable fact: it must have seemed a
stupendous marvel to its discoverer, to whom, it appears, the regular
alternation of the odd and even numbers, a fact so obvious to us that
we are inclined to attach no importance to it, seemed, itself, to be
something wonderful. Here in Geometry and Arithmetic, here was order and
harmony unsurpassed and unsurpassable. What wonder then that Pythagoras
concluded that the solution of the mighty riddle of the Universe was
contained in the mysteries of Geometry? What wonder that he read mystic
meanings into the laws of Arithmetic, and believed Number to be the
explanat