TOWARDS A THEORY OF LIFE 1431 



it turns out to have been handed down by Pythagoreans, all the 

 way to medieval alchemists and magicians, one of whom explains 

 its logical application, exactly anticipating ours, "to any triad", 

 be this mathematical or physical, philosophical and theological. 

 Again, our two directions of reading the life-diagram (beginning 

 with Pwf or with Fwp) next surprise us as being exactly those 

 of the world-wide (yet now especially Eastern) ways of life-inter- 

 pretation and life-direction — signs so frequent on Eastern carpets, 

 as the reader may have noticed. Chinese characters in origins also 

 confirm and anticipate our graph-making. And finally a learned 

 friend, at once mathematician, chess-player, and scholar, was sur- 

 prised by the resemblance of this life-graphic and its moves and 

 results to an early form of chess, traditionally invented by the 

 magi of Persia "to teach their young king the art of life". Such 

 excursions among ancient notations and symbols have only arisen 

 after the devising and use of all such graphics as the present, which 

 have thus been in no respect suggested, nor even in any way modified, 

 by them. Such coincidences surely show that ancient thought was 

 often more vital and evolutionary than it has seemed since their 

 graphic techniques and their meanings were lost sight of; or even 

 suppressed, as savouring of magic and wizardry, occultism and 

 heresy. 



Treatments of Evils. — If, however, all these hydra-headed 

 evils be thus seen in terms of the life they injure, what of their 

 treatment, towards abatement; and why not even towards purga- 

 tion? Take first the evils arising in our first square, of everyday 

 Acts (Pwf). Poverty has always made first appeal, and so had alms 

 from the charitable ; and its disease has ever had generous treatment 

 from the physician. Ignorance, and worse evils of the square of 

 sense-experience-feeling have been struggled with by parents and 

 teachers. Vice, with its many aberrations of imagination-ideation- 

 emotion, has been especially combated by moralists, clergies, and 

 saints. Crimes, from sentinel's thoughtless sleep on his post, and 

 through graver misdeeds, to utmost treason, have all been dealt 

 with by police and by law. But as yet all alike far from success- 

 fully — why ? Is it not largely because all these four classes of would- 

 be reformers or punishers have themselves lacked and fallen short 

 of needed unison in thought and action on life ? For see what better 

 results are now arising, and at many points over the world, from 

 incipient co-operations; and these from the psychologic side first, 

 so notably by our psychological and biological colleagues, the 

 mental physicians; who are so fully dealing with their self-centred, 

 and often more or less morally vitiated, patients and restoring them 

 to saner views of life and duty, thus not only preventing them from 

 further ill-doings, but often restoring them to normal health, with 

 its everyday life-duties and common sense anew. So, too, with the 



