1 THE ‘EMPIRICISM’ OF THE ANCIENTS

ON numerous occasions we have already explained the fundamental difference between the sciences of the ancients and the moderns, which is that between traditional and profane sciences; but this is a question involving so many commonly held errors that it cannot be overemphasized. Thus it is often affirmed as self-evident that the science of the ancients was purely ‘empirical’, which basically amounts to saying that it was not really even a science strictly speaking, but only a kind of practical and utilitarian knowledge. Now it is easy to see on the contrary that preoccupations of this order have never held such sway as among the moderns, and also, even without going further back than what is called ‘classical’ antiquity, that everything concerned with experimentation was considered by the ancients as only constituting knowledge of a very inferior degree. It is not very clear how all of this can be reconciled with the preceding affirmation; and, by a remarkable inconsistency, those very people who express the latter almost never fail to reproach the ancients for their disdain for experimentation!

The source of the error in question, as also for a multitude of others, is the notion of ‘evolution’ or ‘progress’: by virtue of the latter, it is claimed that all knowledge began in a rudimentary state from which it was to be gradually raised and developed. A sort of crude, primitive simplicity is postulated which, of course, cannot be the object of any observation; and it is maintained that everything started from below, as if it were not contradictory to accept that the superior can originate in the inferior. Such a concept is not just any error, but quite specifically a ‘counter-truth’; by this we mean that it goes right against the grain of the truth by a strange inversion which is very characteristic of the modern spirit. The truth, on the contrary, is that since the beginning there has been a sort of degradation or continual 'descent', going from spirituality to materiality, that is, from the superior to the inferior, and manifesting itself in all the domains of human activity; and from this, in fairly recent times, sprang the profane sciences separated from any transcendent principle and justified solely by the practical applications to which they give rise, for this is in sum all that interests modern man, who cares little for pure knowledge, and who, as we have just said, only attributes his own tendencies^[1] to the ancients because he cannot even conceive that theirs may have been altogether different, any more than he can imagine that there may exist sciences altogether different in objective and method from those which he himself cultivates exclusively.

This same error also implies 'empiricism' when understood to designate a philosophical theory, that is, the idea—also very modern—that all knowledge derives entirely from experience and, more precisely, from perceptible experience; in reality, this is only one form of the claim that everything comes from below. It is clear that outside of this preconceived notion there is no reason to suppose that the first state of all knowledge must have been an 'empirical' state; this comparison between the two meanings of the same word certainly has nothing fortuitous about it, and it could be said that it is the philosophical 'empiricism' of the moderns that leads them to attribute to the ancients a de facto 'empiricism'. Now it must be admitted that we have never been able to understand even the possibility of such a concept, so much does it seem to us to go against all evidence: that there may be knowledge that does not come from the senses, is, purely and simply, a matter of fact; but the moderns, who claim that they rely only on facts, ignore them or readily deny them when they do not agree with their theories. In short, the existence of this notion of 'empiricism' simply proves that among those who have expressed it and among those who accept it, certain faculties of a supra-sensible order beginning, it goes without saying, with pure intellectual intuition, have entirely disappeared.^[2]

Generally speaking, the sciences as understood by the moderns, that is to say the secular sciences, actually assume nothing more or less than a rational elaboration of perceptible data; it is therefore they who are truly 'empirical' as to their point of departure; and it could be said that moderns unduly confuse this starting-point of their sciences with the origin of all science. Yet even in their sciences there are sometimes diminished or altered vestiges of ancient knowledge, the real nature of which escapes them; and here we are thinking especially of the mathematical sciences, the essential concepts of which cannot be drawn from sensory experience. The efforts of certain philosophers to explain 'empirically' the origin of these ideas is at times irresistibly comical! And, if some are tempted to protest when we speak of diminishment or alteration for the worse, we will ask them to compare in this regard, for example, the traditional science of numbers to profane arithmetic; no doubt they will then be able to understand quite easily what is meant.

Moreover, most of the profane sciences really owe their origin only to fragments or even, one could say, to residues from misunderstood traditional sciences: elsewhere we have mentioned as particularly characteristic the example of chemistry, which arose, not from genuine alchemy, but from its denaturation by 'puffers', that is, by the profane who, ignorant of the true meaning of hermetic symbols, understood them in a crudely literal sense. We have also cited the case of astronomy, which represents only the material portion of ancient astrology, isolated from everything that constituted the 'spirit' of this science, and irremediably lost to moderns, who go off spouting foolishly that astronomy was discovered in a totally 'empirical' way by Chaldean shepherds, without suspecting that the name ‘Chaldean’ was really the designation of a priestly caste! We could multiply examples of the same kind to establish a comparison between sacred cosmogonies and the theory of the ‘nebula’ and other similar hypotheses, or, in another order of ideas, to show the degeneration of medicine from its ancient dignity of ‘sacerdotal art’, and so on. The conclusion would always be the same: secular people, having illegitimately taken over fragments of knowledge of which they can grasp neither the scope nor the significance, have formed so-called independent sciences which are worth just exactly what they themselves are worth; and thus modern science, which has sprung from them, is literally only the science of the ignorant.^[3] The traditional sciences, as we have so often said, are characterized essentially by their attachment to transcendent principles, upon which they depend strictly as more or less contingent applications, and this is the complete contrary of ‘empiricism’; but the principles necessarily escape the profane, and that is why the latter, even our modern experts, can never really be other than ‘empirical’. Since the time when, as a result of the degradation alluded to previously, men have no longer been equally qualified for all knowledge, that is to say, at least since the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, the profane became inevitable. However, in order that their truncated and falsified science be taken seriously and pass for what it is not, it was necessary that true knowledge together with the initiatic organizations which were charged with conserving and transmitting it disappear, and this is precisely what has happened in the Western world in the course of the last centuries. We should add that in the way moderns envisage the knowledge of the ancients one may clearly see this negation of any ‘supra-human’ element which constitutes the basis of the anti-traditional spirit, and which, after all, is only a direct result of secular ignorance. Not only is everything reduced to purely human proportions, but, as a result of this reversal of all things which the ‘evolutionist’ conception entails, they go so far as to put the ‘infra-human’ at the origin. What is most serious is that in the eyes of our contemporaries these things seem to be self-evident; because they no longer even have any inkling that things might be otherwise, they go so far as to state them as if they could not even be disputed, and to present as ‘facts’ the most unfounded hypotheses. This is most serious, we say, because it is what makes us fear that, having reached such a point, the deviation of the modern spirit may be altogether irremediable. These considerations will help us understand why it is absolutely futile to seek to establish any accord or reconciliation whatsoever between traditional and secular knowledge, and why the first does not have to ask of the second a ‘confirmation’ of which it has no need in and of itself. If we stress this, it is because we know how widespread this point of view is today among those who have some idea of traditional doctrines; yet an ‘exterior’ idea, so to speak, is insufficient to enable one to penetrate their profound nature, as well as to prevent one from being deluded by the false prestige of modern science and its practical applications. The former, by thus putting on the same plane things that are in no way comparable, not only waste their time and effort, but also risk going astray and misleading others into all kinds of false conceptions. And the many varieties of ‘occultism’ are there to show that this danger is only too real.

origin. What is most serious is that in the eyes of our contemporaries these things seem to be self-evident; because they no longer even have any inkling that things might be otherwise, they go so far as to state them as if they could not even be disputed, and to present as ‘facts’ the most unfounded hypotheses. This is most serious, we say, because it is what makes us fear that, having reached such a point, the deviation of the modern spirit may be altogether irremediable. These considerations will help us understand why it is absolutely futile to seek to establish any accord or reconciliation whatsoever between traditional and secular knowledge, and why the first does not have to ask of the second a ‘confirmation’ of which it has no need in and of itself. If we stress this, it is because we know how widespread this point of view is today among those who have some idea of traditional doctrines; yet an ‘exterior’ idea, so to speak, is insufficient to enable one to penetrate their profound nature, as well as to prevent one from being deluded by the false prestige of modern science and its practical applications. The former, by thus putting on the same plane things that are in no way comparable, not only waste their time and effort, but also risk going astray and misleading others into all kinds of false conceptions. And the many varieties of ‘occultism’ are there to show that this danger is only too real.