Solemn Dissertation on the Philosophy of Silence

priests striking Pythagoras. But just as no one derives the philosophy of silence from the Goddess of silence Angerona, whom Numa Pompilius, King of the Romans, worshipped among his tutelary deities, as Macrobius testifies Book III, Saturnalia, chap. IX., even if Plutarch in the life of Numa narrates that this one had been a Pythagorean, so also one must not flee to Harpocrates in declaring its origin. For it is one thing to venerate a GOD from the superstition of silence; it is another to oppose the art of being silent to the rashness and loquacity of men: the former the Egyptians demanded for Harpocrates; the latter Pythagoras brought into the schools of philosophers. Nothing hindered by Plutarch's opinion in the Treatise on Garrulity: we have men as teachers of speaking, but gods as teachers of silence original: "τοῦ μὲν λέγειν, ἀνθρώπους, τοῦ δὲ σιωπᾶν, θεοὺς διδασκάλους, ἔχομεν.". Since those things which, when placed in the correct order, can agreeably conspire, are wrongly opposed to each other. It is the silence of God to delay the judgments of His anger toward the delinquent because of His long-suffering, but because of that, not to take away the punishments. Compare the same Plutarch on the late vengeance of the Divinity. And thus, men, rivals of GOD in this part, should learn to beware of rash judgments and private vengeance, the philosophy of silence also inviting them. I remain silent, for there will be not a few who have persuaded themselves and others that Harpocrates was a Greek philosopher whose erudition and precepts tended primarily toward prescribing silence and placing it before all things. Which, being devoid of clearer testimonies of events, I leave now in the middle.

§. VII.

With this origin of the philosophy of silence demonstrated, it by no means agrees with what the Gymnosophists, both ancient and more recent, held, whom the Knight Gallus, Jo. Baptista Tavernier, an eyewitness in the Travel Description to the East Indies, Part II, Book III, chap. VI. mentions, that most of the said Indian philosophers, by their constant standing, with their hands raised above their