A painful thrill ran through the young man’s frame; he checked it in an attempt to regain possession of himself. The problem lay before him, more pressing and poignant than before. Earth said: _Fatality_. Heaven said: _Providence_. Mankind, between the two, replied: _Madness! Pain! Slavery!_ In the depths of his own nature, however, the future adept heard an invincible voice replying to the chains of earth and the flaming heavens with the cry: _Liberty!_ Who were right; sages, or priests, the wretched or the mad, or was it himself? In reality all these voices spoke the truth, each triumphed in its own sphere, but none gave up to him its _raison d’être_. The three worlds all existed, unchangeable as the heart of Demeter, the light of the constellations and the human breast, but only the one who could find agreement between them and the law of their equilibrium would be truly wise; he alone would be in possession of divine knowledge and capable of aiding mankind. It was in the synthesis of the three worlds that the secret of the _Kosmos_ lay! As he gave utterance to this discovery he had just made, Pythagoras rose to his feet. His eager glance was fixed on the Doric façade of the temple; the majestic building seemed transfigured beneath Diana’s chaste beams. There he believed that he saw the ideal image of the world and the solution of the problem he was seeking. The base, columns, architrave, and triangular pediment suddenly represented, in his eyes, the triple nature of man and the universe, of the microcosm and the macrocosm crowned by divine unity, itself a trinity. The Kosmos, controlled and penetrated by God, formed “The sacred Quaternion, the source of Nature; whose cause is eternal.”[2] Yes, here concealed in these geometrical lines was the key of the universe, the science of numbers, the ternary law regulating the constitution of beings, and the septenary law that governs their evolution. Pythagoras saw the worlds move through space in accordance with the rhythm and harmony of the sacred numbers. He saw the balance of earth and heaven of which human liberty holds control; the three worlds, the natural, the human, and the divine, sustaining and determining one another, and playing the universal drama in a double--ascending and descending--movement. He divided the spheres of the invisible enveloping the visible world and ever animating it; finally, he conceived of the purification and liberation of man, on this globe, by triple initiation. All this he saw, along with his life and work, in an instantaneous flash of illumination, with the absolute certainty of the spirit brought face to face with Truth. Now he must prove by Reason what his pure Intelligence had obtained from the Absolute, and this needed a human life, it was the task of a Hercules. Where could he find the knowledge necessary to bring such a labour to a successful issue? Neither the songs of Homer, nor the sages of Ionia, nor the temples of Greece would suffice.