The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX its horizons. To know all is an impossible dream; but woe unto him who dares not to learn all, and who does not know that, in order to know anything, one must learn eternally! They say that in order to learn anything well, one must forget it several times. The world has followed this method. Everything which is to-day debateable had been solved by theancients. Before our annals began, their solutions, written in hieroglyphs, had already no longer any meaning for us. A man has rediscovered their key ; he has opened the cemeteries of ancient science, and he gives to his century a whole world of forgotten theorems, of syntheses as simple and sublime as nature, radiating always from unity, and multiplying themselves like numbers with proportions so exact, that the known demonstrates and reveals the unknown. To under- stand this science, is to see God. The author of this book, as he finishes his work, will think that he has demonstrated it. Then, when you have seen God, the hierophant will say to you:—“ Turn round!” and, in the shadow which you throw in the presence of this sun of intelligences, there will appear to you the devil, that black phantom which you see when your gaze is not fixed upon God, and when you think that your shadow fills the sky,—for the vapours of the earth, the higher they go, seem to magnify it more and more. To harmonize in the category of religion science with revelation and reason with faith, to demonstrate in philosophy the absolute principles which reconcile all the antinomies, and finally to reveal the universal equilibrium of natural forces, is the triple object of this work, which will consequently be divided into three parts. xii