The present study is designed to provide a further and more complete demonstration of what, in a very general sense, is the true nature of these traditional sciences, thus bringing into prominence the abyss separating them from the profane sciences, which are something like a caricature or parody of them. This in turn will make it possible to measure the extent of the decadence undergone by the modern mentality in passing from one to the other; it will also indicate, by correctly situating the objects taken into account by each science, how this decadence follows strictly the downward movement of the cycle now being passed through by our humanity. Let it be clear however that these are questions nobody can ever claim to treat completely, for they are by their very nature inexhaustible; but an attempt will be made to say enough to enable anyone to draw the necessary conclusions so far as the determination of the ‘cosmic moment’ corresponding to the present period is concerned. If, however, a proportion of the matters to be dealt with nevertheless continues to appear obscure to some people, that will only be because the point of view adopted fails to conform to their mental habits, and is too foreign to everything that has been inculcated into them by the education they have received and by the environment in which they live; nothing can be done about this, for there are things for which a symbolical mode of expression properly so called is the only one possible, and which will consequently never be understood by those for whom symbolism is a dead letter. It must also be remembered that a symbolical mode of expression is the indispensable vehicle of all teaching of an initiatic character; but, without even considering the profane world and its evident and in a sense natural lack of comprehension, it is enough to glance at the vestiges of initiation that still persist in the West in order to see what some people, for lack of intellectual ‘qualification’, make of the symbols proffered for their meditation. One may be quite sure that these people, with whatever titles they may be endowed and whatever initiatic degrees they may have received ‘virtually’, will never get so far as to penetrate to the real meaning of the smallest fragment of the mysterious geometry of ‘the Great Architects of the Orient and of the Occident’.
As the West has just been alluded to, one further remark is called for: however far afield the state of mind that has been specifically designated as ‘modern’ may have spread, especially in recent years, and however strong may be the hold it has taken and that it exercises ever more completely — at least externally — over the whole world, this state of mind remains nevertheless purely Western in origin: in the West it had its birth, and the West was for a long time its exclusive domain; in the East its influence will never be anything but a Westernization. However far that influence may extend in the course of events still to be unfolded, its extension can never be held to contradict what has been said about the difference between the spirit of the East and that of the West, and this difference is none other than that between the traditional spirit and the modern spirit; for it is all too clear that to the extent that a man ‘Westernizes’ himself, whatever may be his race or country, to that extent he ceases to be an Easterner spiritually and intellectually, that is to say from the one point of view that really holds any interest. This is not a simple question of geography, unless that word be understood in a sense other than its modern one, for there is also a symbolical geography; indeed, in this connection, there is a very significant correspondence between the domination of the West and the end of a cycle, for the West is the place where the sun sets, that is to say where it arrives at the end of its daily journey, and where, according to Chinese symbolism, ‘the ripe fruit falls to the foot of the tree’. As to the means whereby the West has come to establish that domination, of which the ‘modernization’ of a more or less considerable number of Easterners is only the latest and most vexing consequence, it has been made sufficiently clear in the author’s other works that these means are based on material strength alone, which amounts to saying that Western domination is itself no more than an expression of the ‘reign of quantity’.
Thus, from whatever side one looks at things, one is always brought back to the same considerations and constantly sees them verified in all possible applications. There ought not to be anything surprising in this, for truth is necessarily coherent; but that certainly does not mean that truth is ‘systematic’, as profane philosophers and scholars all too readily imagine, confined as they are within narrowly limited conceptions to which alone the word ‘systems’ can properly be applied, and which merely reflect the insufficiency of individual minds left to their own devices; this is so even when the minds in question belong to those conventionally called ‘men of genius’, for all the most vaunted speculations of such people are certainly not equal in value to a knowledge of the smallest traditional truth. Enough has been said on that subject in another place, for it has previously been found necessary to denounce the errors of ‘individualism’, for that again is one of the characteristics of the modern spirit; here it may be added that the false unity of the individual, conceived as constituting in himself a complete whole, corresponds in the human order to the false unity of the so-called ‘atom’ in the cosmic order: both the one and the other are merely elements that are regarded as ‘simple’ from a purely quantitative point of view, and as such are supposed to be capable of a sort of indefinite repetition, which is strictly speaking an impossibility since it is essentially incompatible with the very nature of things; in fact, this indefinite repetition is nothing but the pure multiplicity toward which the present world is straining with all its might, without however being able ever to lose itself entirely therein, because pure multiplicity is situated beneath the level of manifested existence, and represents the extreme opposite of principial unity. The descending cyclic movement must therefore be considered as taking place between these two poles, starting from unity, or rather from the point closest to unity in the domain of manifestation, relatively to the state of existence envisaged, and gradually tending toward multiplicity, that is to say toward multiplicity considered analytically and without reference to any principle, for it goes without saying that in the principial order all multiplicity is synthetically comprehended in unity itself. It might appear that there is, in a sense, multiplicity at the two extreme points, in the same way as there is correlatively, as has just been pointed out, unity on the one side and ‘units’ on the other; but the notion of inverse analogy applies strictly here too, so that while the principial multiplicity is contained in metaphysical unity, arithmetical or quantitative ‘units’ are on the other hand contained in the other and inferior multiplicity. Incidentally, does not the mere possibility of speaking of ‘units’ in the plural show clearly enough how far removed the thing so spoken of is from true unity? The multiplicity of the lower order is by definition purely quantitative, it could be said to be quantity itself, deprived of all quality; on the other hand the multiplicity of the higher order, or that which can be called so analogically, is really a qualitative multiplicity, that is to say the integrality of the qualities or attributes that constitute the essence of beings and of things. So it can be said that the descent referred to tends away from pure quality toward pure quantity, both the one and the other being limits situated outside manifestation, the one above it and the other beneath. In relation to the special conditions of our world or of our state of existence, these limits are an expression of the two universal principles that have elsewhere been referred to as ‘essence’ and ‘substance’, and they are the two poles between which all manifestation is produced. This is a point that must be explained more fully before going any further, for it provides an indispensable key to the better understanding of the considerations to be developed later in this study.