Page:Stirling William The Canon 1897.djvu/33

Rh been brought to the service of Art. Geometry also provided a symbolical code, which may some day be understood. These geometrical symbols enabled the mathematicians to import the secret mysteries into their works, and also gave to the builders a means of applying a numerical system to the temples, which, as Plato says, exhibited the pattern of the laws in Egypt. Considerable traces of this symbolical geometry survive in the arcana of Freemasonry. Most of the practical secrets of the old mediæval architects, who built the cathedrals according to the mysteries of the church, have perished with the old craft lodges, which preceded the establishment of the modern theoretical masonry. Nevertheless it is possible to gather out of the early architectural and technical books some clue to the old practice of building. All old writers on architecture, as well as freemasons, insist that geometry is the foundation of their art, but their hints as to its application are so obscure, that no one in recent times has been able to explain how it was used.

Philosophy must have been equally dependent upon some system of geometry, for Plato wrote over the door of his academy "LET NONE IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE," and in the "Republic" (bk. vii. 527), he says, "You must in the utmost possible manner direct the citizens of your beautiful city on no account to fail to apply themselves to GEOMETRY"—a science which, he says, "flatly contradicts the language employed by those who handle it." From this it may be concluded, that Plato meant to inform us, that no one could understand his philosophy without knowing the geometrical basis of it, since geometry contained the fundamental secret of all the ancient science.

It is known both to freemasons and architects, that the mystical figure called the Vesica Piscis, so