vestiges impressed
upon natural objects, which are numbers, the which display its
progress, reasons, modes and operations in a certain manner, because in
the number (of) multitude, the number (of) measures, and the number (of)
moment or weight, the truth and Being are found in all things.[P]

[O] Atteso che sempre e altro ed altro, e corre eterno per la
privazione.

[P] Number is, as the great writer (Balzac) thought, an Entity, and
at the same time, a Breath emanating from what he called God, and
what we call the ALL, the breath which alone could organize the
physical Kosmos.--("The Secret Doctrine.")

Anaxagoras and Empedocles considered that the omnipotent and
all-producing divinity fills all things, and with them nothing was so
small that it did not contain within it the occult in every respect,
although they were always progressing onwards to where it was
predominant, and where it found a more magnificent and elevated
expression.

The Chaldeans sought for Truth by means of subtraction, not knowing how
to affirm anything about it; and proceeded without these dogs of
demonstrations and syllogisms, but solely forcing themselves to
penetrate by removing and digging and clearing away by means of
negations of every kind and discourses both open and secret.

Plato went twisting and turning and tearing to pieces and placing
embankments so that the volatile and fugacious species should be as it
were caught in a net and held behind the hedges of definitions, and he
considered that superior things were, by participation, and according to
similitude, reflected in those inferior, and these in those according to
their greater dignity and excellence, and that the truth was in both the
one and the other, according to a certain analogy, order and scale, in
which the lowest of the superior order agrees with the highest of the
inferior order. So that progress was from the lowest of nature to the
highest, as from evil to good, from darkness to light, from the simple
power to the simple action.

Aristotle boasts of being able to arrive at the desired booty by means
of the imprints of tracks and vestiges, while he believes the effects
will lead to the cause, although he, above all others who have occupied
themselves with this sort of chase, has most deviated from the path, so
as to be able hardly to distinguish the footsteps. Theologians there
are, who, nourished in certain sects, seek the truth of nature