Charles Kingsley

“ But, if I may dare to ask . . . . does not Apollonius regard the circle, like all other curves, as not depending primarily on its own centre for its existence, but as generated by the section of any cone by a plane at right angles to its axis?'
'But must we not draw, or at least conceive a circle, in order to produce that cone? And is not the axis of that cone determined by the centre of that circle?'
Philammon stood rebuked.
'Do not be ashamed; you have only, unwittingly, laid open another, and perhaps, as deep a symbol. ”

“ Does the lover mistake his mistress's picture for the living, speaking reality? We worship the idea of which the image is a symbol. Will you blame us because we use that symbol to represent the idea to our own affections and emotions instead of leaving it a barren notion, a vague imagination of our own intellect?'
'Then,' asked Philammon, with a faltering voice, yet unable to restrain his curiosity, 'then you do reverence the heathen gods?'
Why Hypatia should have felt this question a sore one, puzzled Philammon ”

“ To live in Him they must be pervaded by His life. Do you think it possible—do you think it even reverent to affirm that there can be anything within the infinite glory of Deity which has the power of excluding from the space which it occupies that very being from which it draws its worth, and which must have originally pervaded that thing, in order to bestow on it its organization and its life? ”

“ Rather believe that His wisdom and splendour, like a subtle and piercing fire, insinuates itself eternally with resistless force through every organized atom, and that were it withdrawn but for an instant from the petal of the meanest flower, gross matter, and the dead chaos from which it was formed, would be all which would remain of its loveliness. ”

“ Does He retire after creating, from the spaces which He occupied during creation, reduced to the base necessity of making room for His own universe, and endure the suffering—for the analogy of all material nature tells us that it is suffering—of a foreign body, like a thorn within the flesh, subsisting within His own substance? ”

“ But, in fact, they regard Deity as the maker of a dead machine, which, once made, will move of itself thenceforth, and repudiate as heretics every philosophic thinker, whether Gnostic or Platonist, who, unsatisfied with so dead, barren, and sordid a conception of the glorious all, wishes to honour the Deity by acknowledging His universal presence, and to believe, honestly, the assertion of their own Scriptures, that He lives and moves, and has His being in the universe.'
Philammon gently suggested that the passage in question was worded somewhat differently in the Scripture. ”

“ Philammon, it may be seen, was far advanced by this time; for he bore the allusions to Isis without the slightest shudder. Nay—he dared even to offer consolation to the beautiful mourner.
'The philosopher,' he said, 'will hardly lament the loss of a mere outward idolatry. For if, as you seem to think, there were a root of spiritual truth in the symbolism of nature, that cannot die. ”

“ They who ascribe miraculous power to dead men's bones, who make temples of charnel- houses, and bow before the images of the meanest of mankind, have surely no right to accuse of idolatry the Greek or the Egyptian, who embodies in a form of symbolic beauty ideas beyond the reach of words! ”

“ We, on the other hand, have been taught by the primeval philosophers of Greece, by the priests of ancient Egypt, and the sages of Babylon, to recognise in them the universal powers of nature, those children of the all- quickening spirit, which are but various emanations of the one primeval unity—say rather, various phases of that unity, as it has been variously conceived, according to the differences of climate and race, by the wise of different nations. ”

“ But for the sake of the talisman engraven on that agate, if for no other reason, I cannot give it up.'
'Ah! for the sake of the talisman! That is wise, now! That is noble! Like a philosopher! Oh, I will not say a word more. Let the beautiful prophetess keep the agate, and take the opal too ”

“ XV. Nephelococcuguia Hypatia had always avoided carefully discussing with Philammon any of those points on which she differed from his former faith. She was content to let the divine light of philosophy penetrate by its own power, and educe its own conclusions. ”

“ The vulgar, or rather those who find it their interest to calumniate the vulgar for the sake of confounding philosophers with them, may fancy them mere human beings, subject like man to the sufferings of pain and love, to the limitations of personality. ”

“ Be sure that they, like the poets, meant only spiritual things, even when they seem to talk only of physical ones, and concealed heaven under an earthly garb, only to hide it from the eyes of the profane; while we, in these degenerate days, must interpret and display each detail to the dull ears of men.'
'Do you think, my young friend,' asked Theon, 'that mathematics can be valuable to the philosopher otherwise than as vehicles of spiritual truth? Are we to study numbers merely that we may be able to keep accounts ”