CURRENT TENDENCIES 19 



in philosophy, owing to the fact that no two philosophers 

 ever understand one another, yet it seems necessary to 

 say something at the outset in justification of the scientific 

 as against the mystical attitude. Metaphysics, from the 

 first, has been developed by the union or the conflict of 

 these two attitudes. Among the earliest Greek philoso- 

 phers, the Ionians were more scientific and the Sicilians 

 more mystical. 1 But among the latter, Pythagoras, for 

 example, was in himself a curious mixture of the two 

 tendencies : the scientific attitude led him to his pro- 

 position on right-angled triangles, while his mystic insight 

 showed him that it is wicked to eat beans. Naturally 

 enough, his followers divided into two sects, the lovers 

 of right-angled triangles and the abhorrers of beans ; but 

 the former sect died out, leaving, however, a haunting 

 flavour of mysticism over much Greek mathematical 

 speculation, and in particular over Plato's views on 

 mathematics. Plato, of course, embodies both the 

 scientific and the mystical attitudes in a higher form 

 than his predecessors, but the mystical attitude is dis- 

 tinctly the stronger of the two, and secures ultimate 

 victory whenever the conflict is sharp. Plato, moreover, 

 adopted from the Eleatics the device of using logic to 

 defeat common sense, and thus to leave the field clear for 

 mysticism a device still employed in our own day by 

 the adherents of the classical tradition. 



The logic used in defence of mysticism seems to me 

 faulty as logic, and in a later lecture I shall criticise it on 

 this ground. But the more thorough-going mystics do 

 not employ logic, which they despise : they appeal instead 

 directly to the immediate deliverance of their insight. 

 Now, although fully developed mysticism is rare in the 

 West, some tincture of it colours the thoughts of many 



1 Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, pp. 85 ff. 



