Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/41

 underlies all others, or whether it is just one form which appears amongst others, as, for instance, in the case of Brahmā, who is the One, but is not at the same time an object of worship. This form has certainly the least chance of appearing in the Religion of Beauty and in that of External Utility. In the multiplicity and particularisation which are characteristic of these religions, it is not possible to meet with the element of measure which limits itself and returns to itself. Still they are not devoid of traces of this unity. Aristotle, speaking of the Pythagorean numbers, of the triad, says: We believe that we have really called on the gods only when we have called on them three times. Amongst the Pythagoreans and in Plato we come upon the abstract basis of the Idea, but the characteristics do not in any way get beyond this condition of abstraction, and partly continue in the abstract state represented by one, two, three; though in Plato they get a rather more concrete form, where we have described the nature of the One and the Other, that which is different in itself, θάτερον, and the third which is the unity of both.

The thought here is not of the fanciful kind which we have in the Indian religions, but is rather a mere abstraction. We have actual categories of thought which are better than numbers, better than the category of number, but which, all the same, are entirely abstract categories of thought.

It is, however, chiefly about the time of Christ’s birth, and during several centuries after, that we come upon a philosophical representation of this truth in a figurative form, and which has for its basis the popular idea expressed by the Trinity. It is found partly in philosophical systems pure and simple, such as that of Philo, who had carefully studied Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy, and then in the later writers of the Alexandrian School, but more especially in a blending of the Christian religion with philosophical ideas of the kind referred to, and it is this blending of the two which constitutes in a large