Nature herself, thought the Pythagoreans, is instinct with spiritual meanings. Whilst the soul is embodied and limited by the senses she cannot ordinarily or easily get these meanings direct. They have to be clothed or bodied in those masses of units and ratios that are color, sound, and form. She touches these ordered aggregations (numbers them, understands them) on three planes: first as sensation; then as aesthetic feeling; then, perhaps, in their spiritual meaning. The musician, as he composes, does receive direct a bit of nature's spiritual meaning and then aggregates such numbers and ratios of vibration as will express it. And if his music, carrying this meaning, be so sounded as to affect plates of sand or other fine powder, forms will result such as nature herself makes—perhaps in the same way, though we cannot hear the sound for its subtlety—forms of flowers, trees, groves, and what not. For any of nature's meanings may get out along the ways of sound, color, or form. We can conceive that the whole of evolution is guided by number, ordered number, ratio. The electrons in an atom and the atoms in a molecule and the molecules in a cell or crystal are not only so many in number but definite in arrangement, in form. They mean something; they express in arrangement and in successive changes in arrangement a unitary spiritual idea of nature's, and in that is the force of evolution. If the units disintegrate and scatter so that we speak of death, the idea, the real life, remains and embodies again in a new harmonized mass of units. The idea is the magnet that attracts and arranges them and incarnates among them. It is their spiritual number, the cause of their countable number and scientifically ascertainable arrangement.
Number, therefore, in the highest sense, is not the same as a heap, a mass, an anyhowness; it is an order expressive of a spiritual meaning. In the highest sense it is that spiritual meaning itself even before expression in an ordered mass of items or vibrations. And in this sense the soul is a number and nature the synthesis of numbers; both finding expression, the one in the soul's several garments (one only known to science) and works; the other in what we call "nature." Pythagoras will yet find his full vindication in philosophy. He is of the future, not the past.
DOES NIRVÂNA MEAN ANNIHILATION? by T. H.
IT is sometimes said by superficial students that Nirvâna means total annihilation; while more accurate scholars point out that it means the extinction of the impermanent part of our nature, whereby the permanent prevails. This is well brought out in the following quotation from The Kashf al-Mahjûb, the oldest Persian treatise on Sûfiism, translated by Reynold A. Nicholson.
Annihilation is the annihilation of one attribute through the subsistence of another attribute.... Whoever is annihilated from his own will subsists in the will of God, as the power of fire transmutes to its own quality anything that falls into it ... but fire affects only the quality of iron without changing its substance.
It is evident that what is annihilated is the personality, which, according to the teachings, is an erroneous conception preventing the manifestation of the real Self. Thus the doctrine of annihilation is seen to be a consistent part of a logical teaching and not the untenable idea which some critics have represented it to be. The fact that most of us in our present state of development look with reluctance at the idea of losing our transitory personality does not invalidate the truth of the teaching; for the teaching relates to the destinies of the permanent Spirit, in which the wishes of our erring, transitory personality play but little part. Were we washed clean, standing forth in robes of light, as most religious believers hope to be at some time or other, we might consent in will and understanding to this teaching; seeing then that the personality is indeed a delusion and a source of woe, whose annihilation is even to be desired.
In the meantime, and for immediate practical purposes, we can consider annihilation as a process applicable to the development of our character; substituting, however, a less harsh word—say neutralization. There are in our character many elements which we should wish to reduce to nothing; there are many false selves which obtrude themselves on us, claiming a share of our life and crowding out the better phases of our character. The elimination of these, in order that the better elements may shine forth unobscured, is a process of purification. Why, then, may not Nirvâna be so considered? To what extent have our prejudices on the subject been aroused by the mere use of an inadequate word in translation? Nirvâna is extinction of the false. "Ring out the false, ring in the true!"