look with which the boy welcomed her, as he met her in the Museum gardens, pardonably tempted her curiosity to in- quire what miracles her own wisdom might have already worked. She stopped in her walk, and motioned her father to begin a conversation with Philammon. " Well ! " asked the old man, with an encour- aging smile, " and how does our pupil like his new " "You mean my conic sections, father? It is hardly fair to expect an unbiassed answer in my presence." " Why so?" said Philammon. " Why should I not tell you, as well as all the world, the fresh and wonderful field of thought which they have opened to me, in a few short hours?" 272 Hypatia " What then ? " asked Hypatia, smiling, as if she knew what the answer would be. " In what does my commentary differ from the original text of Apollonius, on which I have so faithfully based it?" "Oh, as much as a living body differs from a dead one. Instead of mere dry disquisitions on the properties of lines and curves, I found a mine of poetry and theology. Every dull mathematical formula seemed transfigured, as if by a miracle, into the symbol of some deep and noble principle of the unseen world." " And do you think that he of Perga did not see as much? or that we can pretend to surpass, in depth of insight, the sages of the elder world ? Be sure that they, like the poets, meant only spiritual things, even when they seem to talk only of physi- cal 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 philoso- pher otherwise than as vehicles of spiritual truth ! Are we to study numbers merely that we may be able to keep accounts; or as Pythagoras did, in order to deduce from their laws the ideas by which the universe, man, Divinity itself, con- sists?" "That seems to me certainly to be the nobler purpose." " Or conic sections, that we may know better how to construct machinery; or rather to devise from them symbols of the relations of Deity to its various emanations?" Nephelococcuguia 273 "You use your dialectic like Socrates himself, my father," said Hypatia. " If I do, it is only for a temporary purpose. I should be sorry to accustom Philammon to sup- pose that the essence of philosophy was to be found in those minute investigations of words and analyses of notions, which seem to constitute Plato's chief power in the eyes of those who, like the Christian sophist Augustine, worship his letter while they neglect his spirit ; not seeing that those dialogues, which they fancy the shrine itself, are but vestibules " " Say rather, veils, father." " Veils, indeed, which were intended to baffle the rude gaze of the carnal-minded ; but still vesti- bules, through which the enlightened soul might be led up to the inner sanctuary, to the Hesperid gardens and golden fruit of the Timaeus and the oracles. . . . And for myself, were but those two books left, I care not whether every other writing in the world perished to-morrow." ] " You must except Homer, father." "Yes, for the herd. . . . But of what use would he be to them without some spiritual commen- tary?" " He would tell them as little, perhaps, as the circle tells to the carpenter who draws one with his compasses." " And what is the meaning of the circle ? " asked Philammon. " It may have infinite meanings, like every other natural phenomenon; and deeper meanings in proportion to the exaltation of the soul which be- 1 This astounding speech is usually attributed to Proclus, Hypatia's " great " successor. 274 Hypatia holds it. But, consider, is it not, as the one per- fect figure, the very symbol of the totality of the spiritual world ; which, like it, is invisible, except at its circumference, where it is limited by the dead gross phenomena of sensuous matter ! and even as the circle takes its origin from one center, itself unseen, a point, as Euclid defines it, where- of neither parts nor magnitude can be predicated, does not the world of spirits revolve round one abysmal being, unseen and undefinable in itself, as I have so often preached, nothing, for it is con- ceivable only by the negation of all properties, even of those of reason, virtue, force; and yet, like the center of the circle, the cause of all other existences?" " I see," said Philammon ; for the moment, cer- tainly, the said abysmal Deity struck him as a somewhat chill and barren notion . . . but that might be caused only by the dulness of his own spiritual perceptions. At all events, if it was a logical conclusion, it must be right. "Let that be enough for the present. Here- after you may be I fancy that I know you well enough to prophesy that you will be able to recognize in the equilateral triangle inscribed with- in the circle, and touching it only with its angles, the three supra-sensual principles of existence, which are contained in Deity as it manifests itself in the physical universe, coinciding with its utmost limits, and yet, like it, independent on that unseen central One which none dare name." " Ah ! " said poor Philammon, blushing scarlet at the sense of his own dulness, " I am, indeed, not worthy to have such wisdom wasted upon my im- perfect apprehension. . . . But, if I may dare to Nephelococcuguia 275 ask . . . does not Apollonius regard the circle, like all other curves, as not depending primarily on its own center 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 center of that circle ? " Philammon stood rebuked. " Do not be ashamed ; you have only, unwit- tingly, laid open another, and perhaps, as deep a symbol. Can you guess what it is ? " Philammon puzzled in vain. " Does it not show you this ? That, as every conceivable right section of the cone discloses the circle, so in all which is fair and symmetric you will discover Deity, if you but analyze it in a right and symmetric direction ? " " Beautiful ! " said Philammon, while the old man added : "And does it not show us, too, how the one perfect and original philosophy may be discovered in all great writers, if we have but that scientific knowledge, which will enable us to extract it?" " True, my father : but just now, I wish Philam- mon, by such thoughts as I have suggested, to rise to that higher and more spiritual insight into nature, which reveals her to us as instinct through- out all fair and noble forms of her at least with Deity itself; to make him feel that it is not enough to say, with the Christians, that God has made the world, if we make that very assertion an excuse for believing that His presence has been ever since withdrawn from it." 276 Hypatia " Christians, I think, would hardly say that,** said Philammon. M Not in words. 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 honor the Deity by acknowledging His uni- versal 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. " True. But if the one be true, its converse will be true also. If the universe lives and moves, and has its being in Him, must He not necessarily pervade all things ? " "Why? Forgive my dulness, and explain." " Because, if He did not pervade all things, those things which He did not pervade would be as it were interstices in His being, and in so far, with- out Him." " True, but still they would be within His cir- cumference." " Well argued. But yet they would not live in Him, but in themselves. 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 Nephelococcuguia 277 it its organization and its life? 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 suffer- ing 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 ? Rather believe that His wisdom and splendor, 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 tlie meanest flower, gross matter, and the dead chaos from which it was formed, would be all which would remain of its loveliness. . . . " Yes " she went on, after the method of her school, who preferred, like most decaying ones, harangues to dialectic, and synthesis to induction. ..." Look at yon lotus-flower, rising like Aphro- dite from the wave in which it has slept through- out the night, and saluting, with bending swan-neck, that sun which it will follow lovingly around the sky. Is there no more there than brute matter, pipes and fibres, color and shape, and the mean- ingless life-in-death which men call vegetation? Those old Egyptian priests knew better, who could see in the number and the form of those ivory petals and golden stamina, in that mysterious daily birth out of the wave, in that nightly baptism, from which it rises each morning re-born to a new life, the signs of some divine idea, some mysterious law, common to the flower itself, to the white-robed priestess who held it in the temple-rites, and to the goddess to whom they both were consecrated. . . . The flower of Isis ! . . Ah ! well. Nature has 278 Hypatia her sad symbols, as well as her fair ones. And in proportion as a misguided nation has forgotten the worship of her to whom they owed their greatness, for novel and barbaric superstitions, so has her sacred flower grown rarer and more rare, till now fit emblem of the worship over which it used to shed its perfume it is only to be found in gardens such as these a curiosity to the vulgar, and, to such as me, a lingering monument of wisdom and of glory passed away." 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. And thus the lotus-flower must still retain its meaning, as long as its species exists on earth." " Idolatry ! " answered she, with a smile. " My pupil must not repeat to me that worn-out Chris- tian calumny. Into whatsoever low superstitions the pious vulgar may have fallen, it is the Chris- tians now, and not the heathens, who are idolaters. 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 ! "Idolatry? Do I worship the Pharos when I gaze at it, as I do for hours, with loving awe, as the token to me of the all-conquering might of Nephelococcuguia 279 Hellas? Do I worship the roll on which Homer's words are written, when I welcome with delight the celestial truths which it unfolds to me, and even prize and love the material book for the sake of the message which it brings? Do you fancy that any but the vulgar worship the image itself, or dream that it can help or hear them ? Does the lover