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