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dmitted value. It is not surprising if we do not understand him. (2) An extraordinary abuse of analogy and comparison in their various forms (allegory, parable, etc.)--a natural consequence of a mode of thinking that proceeds by means of symbols, not concepts. It has been said, and rightly, that "the only force that makes the vast field of mysticism fruitful is analogy."[100] Bossuet, a great opponent of mystics, had already remarked: "One of the characteristics of these authors is the pushing of allegories to the extreme limit." With warm imagination, having at their disposal overexcited senses, they are lavish of changes of expressions and figures, hoping thereby to explain the world's mysteries. We know to what inventive labors the Vedas, the Bible, the Koran, and other sacred books have given rise. The distinction between literal and figurative sense, which is boundlessly arbitrary, has given commentators a freedom to imagine equal to that of the myth-creators. All this is yet very reasonable; but the imagination left to itself stops at no extravagance. After having strained the meaning of expressions, the imaginative mind exercises itself on words and letters. Thus, the cabalists would take the first or the last letters of the words composing a verse, and would form with them a new word which was to reveal the hidden meaning. Again, they would substitute for the letters composing words the numbers that these letters represent in the Hebrew numerical system and form the strangest combinations with them. In the _Zohar_, all the letters of the alphabet come before God, each one begging to be chosen as the creative element of the universe. Let us also bring to mind numerical mysticism, different from numerical imagination heretofore studied. Here, number is no longer the means that mind employs in order to soar in time and space; it becomes a symbol and material for fanciful construction. Hence arise those "sacred numbers" teeming in the old oriental religions:--3, symbol of the trinity; 4, symbol of the cosmic elements; 7, representing the moon and the planets, etc.[101] Besides these fantastic meanings, there are more complicated inventions--calculating, from the letters of one's name, the years of life of a sick person, the auspices of a marriage, etc. The Pythagorean philosophy, as Zeller has shown, is the systematic form of this mathematical mysticism, for which numbers are not symbols of quantitative relati
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