EPIL0C4UE 779 



Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty. 

 A greater than Verhaeren had this in mind when he told of " the 

 golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store." A greater 

 than Milton had magnified the theme and glorified Him "who 

 sitteth upon the circle of the earth," saying: He measureth the 

 waters in the hollow of his hand, he meteth out the heavens with 

 his span, he comprehendeth the dust of the earth in a measure. 



Moreover the perfection of mathematical beauty is such (as 

 Maclaurin learned of the bee), that whatsoever is most beautiful 

 and regular is also found to be most useful and excellent. 



The living and the dead, things animate and inanimate, we 

 dwellers in the world and this world wherein we dwell, — irdvTa 

 ja fjuav rd yiypcocTKOfMeva, — are bound alike by physical and 

 mathematical law. "Conterminous with space and coeval with 

 time is the kingdom of Mathematics ; ' within this range her 

 dominion is supreme ; otherwise than according to her order 

 nothing can exist, and nothing takes place in contradiction to her 

 laws." So said, some forty years ago, a certain mathematician; 

 and Philolaus the Pythagorean had said much the same. 



But with no less love and insight has the science of Form and 

 Number been appraised in our own day and generation by a very 

 great Naturahst indeed: — by that old man eloquent, that wise 

 student and pupil of the ant and the bee, who died but yesterday, 

 and who in his all but saccular hfe tasted of the firstfruits of 

 immortahty; who curiously conjoined the wisdom of antiquity 

 with the learning of to-day ; whose Proven9al verse seems set to 

 Dorian music; in whose plainest words is a sound as of bees' 

 industrious murmur; and who, being of the same blood and 

 marrow with Plato and Pythagoras, saw in Number "la clef de la 

 voute," and found in it "le comment et le pourquoi des choses." 



