4-iQ 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



PYTHAGORAS ON BEANS. 



To the Editors of the Popular Science Montldy. 



Dear Sirs : Allow me to give expression 

 to some thoughts suggested by reading the 

 interesting article of Dr. Felix Oswald, in 

 the April number of your publication. The 

 author commits an error when he ascribes 

 the forbidding, by Pythagoras, of using 

 beans as an article of food to a deprecating 

 view of it ; it was just the opposite view 

 that caused him to do so. I have before 

 me an essay, " Pythagoras, the Sage of 

 Samos," according to the latest researches, 

 written by Eduard Baltzer (in German), 

 who draws mainly on the " History of Phi- 

 losophy," by Professor Roetb, of Heidelberg. 

 Baltzer's work is the most successful of the 

 different endeavors made to furnish, from 

 the few fragments that have remained of 

 his works, a biography of the greatest of 

 ancient thinkers, the father of philosophy, 

 as he has been truly called. Beans were 

 forbidden for the common use of his fol- 

 lowers, as they were considered a specially 

 sacred article, and were only eaten at certain 

 meals that formed a part of the Pythagorean 

 cultus, the so-called Orphic mysteries. 



The fundamental truth of preparing the 

 body by a pure diet and pure physical hab- 

 its for the growth of spiritual life, that 

 formed the basis for all the doctrines of 

 the ancient philosophers, and that has 

 found the most distinct expression in the 

 words of St. Paul, " Know ye not that ye 

 are the temple of God, and that the spirit 

 of God dwelleth in you?" etc., has become 

 utterly darkened to the modern perception 

 in its clumsy materialistic tendency the 

 very rudiments of instinct, the organic per- 

 ception of the laws of nature underlying its 

 structure, have been lost or utterly distort- 

 ed by the wrong habits of a carnivorous 

 race ; and the modern man, with all his 

 vaunted scientific acquirements, will yet 

 have to go begging to antiquity to gather 

 some crumbs of wisdom and truth. As the 

 earth receives the effects of solar radiation, 

 the source of all its organized physical life, 

 only after it has been modified and polar- 

 ized by its atmospheric medium whereby 



the solar energy assumes, as it were, a 

 geomorphous condition just so all spirit- 

 ual perception in the human mind becomes 

 anthropomorphized, individually as well as 

 generically, by the physical condition of the 

 body ; and the clear-eyed observer recog- 

 nizes the cause of mental and moral anoma- 

 lies in the condition of the physical postu- 

 lates. Pessimism, as it seems to spread 

 like a frightening nightmare through the 

 race, is nothing but a spiritual perception, 

 polarized to distortion by a bodily medium 

 poisoned by tobacco and alcohol ; and ev- 

 ery one suffering from it can cure himself 

 and become an optimist by adopting a pure 

 Pythagorean diet, and thus armored draw 

 truth from the wells of divine revelation. 

 I feel free to say so, because, for the sake 

 of experiment, I have changed myself back- 

 ward and forward severally out of one state 

 of mind into the other. 



Returning to our beans, I find that there 

 is no article of food equal to them for 

 gaining the physical postulate for a higher 

 spiritual soul-life. Wheat may be rightly 

 called the best brain-focd next to wheat 

 probably barley, but receiving a greater 

 share of direct sunlight than the beans, 

 which are surrounded by a thicker husk or 

 hull than the grain ; whereas the latter, re- 

 ceiving a greater share of indirect radiation 

 through their larger leaves, the grain pos- 

 sesses a more positive vital polarity in its 

 nutritive influence, and the bean a more 

 negative one, whereby the former favors 

 subjective, active, intellectual effort, and the 

 latter predisposes to objective intellectual re- 

 ceptivity, the requirement for spiritual per- 

 ception. 



The New - Englanders, who may be 

 called, I suppose, the salt of the American 

 nation, in establishing baked beans as a 

 national dish, have furnished a proof of the 

 absolute wisdom manifested in the mysteri- 

 ous operations of the unconscious in hu- 

 man nature, as a modern pessimistic philos- 

 opher chooses to call the result of divine 

 guidance in the inner life of man. 



Respectfully, Julius Ashman. 



New Yoek, April 4, 1879. 



EDITOR'S TABLE. 



EXPLANA TIONS Til A T DO NO T EXPLAIN. 



THERE is a certain class of minds 

 whose efforts to explain things 

 generally leave them more obscure than 

 they were before. In undertaking to 

 represent a question they complicate 

 rather than simplify it, and instead of 

 helping the learner to understand a sub- 



ject they hinder him. This failure to 

 make things lucid and comprehensible 

 is due to various causes. Oftenest, it 

 comes from a total neglect of the art 

 of luminous writing, and it is unfortu- 

 nate that many scientific men are not a 

 little perverse about cultivating this art. 

 They do not, as a matter of conscience, 



