🤔Philosophy🤔

Philosophy is the purification and perfection of human nature: its purification, because it delivers it from the temerity and folly that proceed from matter and because it disengages its affections from the mortal body; and its perfection, because it makes it recover its original felicity by restoring it to the likeness of God.

Now virtue and truth alone can operate these two things: virtue, by driving away the excess of the passions, and truth, by dispelling the darkness of error and by returning the divine form to such as are disposed to receive it.

For this science, therefore, which ought to render us pure and perfect, it is good to have short and certain rules as so many aphorisms of the art, that by their means we may arrive methodically and in due order at happiness, which is our only end.

Amongst all the rules that contain a summary of Philosophy, the Verses of Pythagoras, called the Golden Verses, justly hold the first rank, for they contain the general precepts of all Philosophy regarding the active as well as the contemplative life. By their means everyone may acquire truth and virtue, render himself pure, and happily attain to the Divine Resemblance. As it is said in the Timaeus of Plato (whom we ought regard as a very exact master of the doctrine of Pythagoras), after having regained his health and recovered his integrity and perfection, he may see himself again in his primitive state of innocence and of light.