René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

That is why Leibnitz said that ‘every system is true in what it affirms and false in what it denies,’ and this means that it contains an amount of truth proportional to the amount of positive reality included in it, and an amount of error corresponding to the reality excluded; it is important to add that it is precisely the negative and limitative side of a ‘system’ that constitutes it as such.

The Gospel parable of the mustard seed may be recalled here, as also the similar texts from the Upanishads quoted elsewhere (see Man and His Becoming according to the Vedānta , chap. 3), and it may also be added in this connection that the Messiah himself is called ‘Seed’ in a number of biblical passages.

In particular to East and West and to The Crisis of the Modern World .

As for Descartes’ own conception of science, it should be noted that he claims that it is possible to reach the stage of having ‘clear and distinct’ ideas about everything, that is, ideas like those of mathematics, thus obtaining the sort of ‘evidence’ that can actually be obtained in mathematics alone.

In the classical definition of the human being as a ‘reasonable animal’, ‘rationality’ represents the ‘specific difference’ by which man is distinguished from all other species in the animal kingdom; it is not applicable outside that kingdom, or in other words, is properly speaking only what the scholastics called a differentia animalis ; ‘rationality’ cannot therefore be spoken of in relation to beings belonging to other states of existence, in particular to supra-individual states, those of the angels, for example; and this is quite in agreement with the fact that reason is a faculty of an exclusively individual order, and one that can in no way overstep the boundaries of the human domain.

It can be said in this connection that of all the meanings that were comprised in the Latin word ratio one alone has been retained, that of ‘calculation’, in the use to which reason is now put in the realm of ‘science’.

It could also legitimately be said to be a ‘fruit’ rather than a ‘seed’; the fact that the fruit itself contains new seeds indicates that the consequence can in its turn play the part of cause at another level, in conformity with the cyclical character of manifestation; but for that to happen it must again pass in one way or another from the ‘apparent’ to the ‘hidden’.

See Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power , where the case of Philip the Fair is specially referred to, and where it was suggested that there may be a fairly close connection between the destruction of the Order of Templars and the alteration of the coinage, something easily understood if it is recognized as at least very plausible that this Order then had the function, among others, of exercising spiritual control in this field; the matter need not be pursued further here, but it may be recalled that the beginning of the modern deviation properly so called has been assigned precisely to this moment.

Numerous studies by A. K. Coomaraswamy may be consulted on this subject, which he has developed profusely and ‘illustrated’ in all its aspects with all necessary explanations.

The Americans have gone so far in this direction that they commonly say that a man is ‘worth’ so much, intending to convey in that way the figure to which his fortune has risen; they say too, not that a man has succeeded in his affairs, but that he ‘is a success’, and this is as much as to identify the individual completely with his material gains.

This association, by the way, is not an entirely new thing, for it actually goes back to the ‘moral arithmetic’ of Bentham, which dates from the end of the eighteenth century.

This sort of thing is particularly apparent in spiritualism, and in the crudest possible forms; a number of examples were given in The Spiritist Fallacy .

It is as a result of this same incapacity and of the confusion to which it gives rise that Kant, in the philosophic field, did not hesitate to declare to be ‘inconceivable’ everything that is merely ‘unimaginable’; moreover, speaking more generally, it is the very same limitations that really gave birth to all the varieties of ‘agnosticism’.

Pliny’s Natural History in particular seems to be an almost inexhaustible source of examples of things of this kind; it is moreover a source on which all those who came after him have drawn most abundantly.

See The Symbolism of the Cross , chaps. 6 and 20.

This same form reappears at the beginning of the embryonic existence of every individual comprised in that cyclical development, the individual embryo ( pinda ) being the microcosmic analogy of what the ‘Egg of the World’ ( Brahmānda ) is in the macrocosmic order.

The movement of the celestial bodies can be given as an example. It is not exactly circular, but elliptical; the ellipse constitutes as it were a first ‘specification’ of the circle, by the splitting of the center into two poles or ‘foci’ in the direction of one of the diameters, which thereafter plays a special ‘axial’ part, while at the same time all the other diameters are differentiated one from another in respect of their lengths. It may be added incidentally in this connection that, since the planets describe ellipses of which the sun occupies one of the foci, the question arises as to what the other focus corresponds to; as there is nothing corporeal actually there, there must be something belonging only to the subtle order; but that question cannot be further examined here, as it would be quite outside our subject.

See Fabre d’Olivet, The Hebraic Tongue Restored and The True Meaning of the Hebrew Words Re-established and Proved by their Radical Analysis , (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1981).

The point is not that earth as an element is assimilated simply and solely to the solid state, as some people wrongly think, but that it is rather the very principle of solidity.

This is why the spherical form is attributed in the Islamic tradition to the ‘Spirit’ ( ar-Rūḥ ) or to the primordial Light.

In the Hebrew Kabbalah the cubic form corresponds to Iesod , one of the Sephiroth , and Iesod is in fact the ‘foundation’ (and if it be objected in this connection that Iesod is nevertheless not the last Sephirah , the answer must be that the only one that follows it is Malkuth , which is actually the final ‘synthesization’ in which all things are brought back to a state corresponding, at another level, to the principial unity of Kether ); in the subtle constitution of the human individuality, according to the Hindu tradition, the same form is related to the ‘basic’ chakra or mūlādhāra ; and this is also connected with the mysteries of the Ka‘bah in the Islamic tradition; also, in architectural symbolism, the cube is properly the form of the ‘first stone’ of a building, otherwise of the ‘foundation-stone’, laid at the lowest level, to serve as support for the whole structure of the building, thus assuring its stability.