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It was the prevailing opinion among the Hebrews, that the Cabala was delivered by God to Moses, and thence through a succession of ages, even to the times of Ezra, preserved by tradition only, without the help of writing, in the same manner as the doctrine of Pythagoras was delivered by Archippus and Lysiades, who kept schools at Thebes in Greece, where the scholars learned all their master's precepts by heart, and employed their memories instead of books.
Stuff and nonsense all these globes and powders, with all the other follies of the cabala and the spagyric art." I imagined I could hear him talk like that in the interval between two pinches of snuff, and I really did not know what to reply to such a Christian speech.
I praised the wisdom of the oracle, and kissed the Pythoness a score of times, promising that the cabala should be obeyed implicitly, adding that she had no need of being taught the science since she knew it as well as the inventor. I spoke the truth, but Esther laughed, and, fearing lest I should really think so, took pains to assure me of the contrary.
Let us hasten to be practical; let us not so long forget the promised title-pages; let it at length satisfy to show, more than theoretically, how authorship stirs up the mind to daily-teeming projects, and then casts out its half-made progeny; how scraps of paper come to be covered with the cabala of half-written thoughts, thenceforward doomed to suffer the dispersion-fate of Sibylline leaves; how stores of mingled information gravitate into something of order, each seed herding with its fellows; and how every atom of mixed metal, educationally held in solution by the mind, is sought out by a keen precipitating test, gregariously building up in time its own true crystal.
In referring to the Cabala, I am not ignorant of the date of the oldest Rabbinical writings which contain or refer to this philosophy, but I coincide with Eichorn, and very many before Eichorn, that the foundations of the Cabala were laid and well known long before Christ, though not all the fanciful superstructure. Paul, the incarnate one in the Messiah.
Instead of giving the healthy imagination and pure reason full power to act, the teachers of the Cabala arrogated to themselves the power to decide what to do and how to do it, and as a result the Jewish observances, as they exist to-day in pious communities, are bound up in arbitrary rules and superstitious absurdities which are as unlike the primitive and rational religion of Israel as night is to day."
* Letters of the Sidneys, vol i. p. 287, et seq. Cabala, p. 363 At last her settled habits of prudence and ambition prevailed over her temporary inclination; and having sent for the duke of Anjou, she had a long conference with him in private, where she was supposed to have made him apologies for breaking her former engagements.
But of course you know as well as I do that the Cabala has not merely nothing to do with mathematics, but is in conflict with the very essence of mathematics. The Cabala bears to mathematics the same sort of relationship that the confused or fallacious chatter of the Sophists bore to the serene, lofty doctrines of Plato and of Aristotle."
"How meanest thou?" said the astrologer, hastily. "Thou dost not suppose that alchymy, which is the servant of the heavenly host, is their opponent?" "Nay," answered the disciple, "but you allow that we may be enabled to ward off evils, and to cure diseases, otherwise fatal to us, by the gift of Uriel and the charm of the Cabala?" We must abstract ourselves from passion and earthly desires.
And they astonished these beautiful but ignorant creatures by speaking to them of the stars with a knowledge acquired by seafaring. That's clear, I think, and I should like to know in what M. Mosaide could contradict me." Mosaide kept mute and M. d'Asterac, smiling again, said: "M. Coignard, you do not reason so badly, ignorant as you still are of gnosticism and the Cabala.
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