‘The essence and power of that vision lies in its all-embracing, unifying character; it unites religion and science, mathematics and music, medicine and cosmology, body, mind, and spirit in an inspired and luminous synthesis.’ Like their founder, the Pythagoreans were devotees of mathematics who found in numbers and geometrical forms intimations of a hidden order. Koestler had experienced something akin to such a vision when awaiting death in a Spanish prison cell, and there can be no doubt that he regretted the absence of anything like it in modern science.
