impressions of the senses; first looked beneath the surface of appearances; first appreciated the value of that serious examination of the phenomena of the natural world, which, even while his disciples suffered themselves to be carried most distantly away from the path of sober and rational inquiry, was never afterwards wholly lost sight of. "Great men," exclaims Pliny, with just enthusiasm, after naming him and Ptolemy's great precursor Hipparchus, whose later discoveries resulted from those of Thales: "elevated above the common standard of human nature, by discovering the laws which celestial occurrences obey, and by freeing the wretched mind of man from the fears which eclipses inspired. Hail to you and to your genius! Interpreters of Heaven! Worthy recipients of the laws of the universe! Authors of principles which connect gods and men!"

PYTHAGORAS, meanwhile, had arisen in the age of Thales, and plucked out the heart of a greater portion of the mundane mystery. He was born in the island of Samos, somewhere about five hundred and seventy years before Christ. He travelled Egypt in his youth, bearing letters to king Amasis from Polycrates (then, or shortly after, the tyrant of Samos); and going thence to Asia, is said even to have visited India and the Gymnosophists. But extreme caution is necessary to discriminate any event of his life, obscured as all of them are by a cloud of fables: merely to accept the popular accounts of the men with whom he had associated or studied, would be to stretch his term of existence through more than three centuries. In this respect, ancient tradition seems entitled to implicit belief on one point only: that he had certainly, as a young man, conversed much with PHERECYDES OF SCYROS, who is alluded to by Josephus as having studied philosophy in Egypt; and to whom also, it is on record, supernatural powers were supposed to belong, because of his having predicted the events of an earthquake and a thunder-storm, both of which actually followed. If this were so, modern inquirers, though they follow hard upon his steps, have not yet overtaken Pherecydes of Scyros. Nothing can be more uncertain, however, than the nature of the progress Pherecydes had made in physical or moral sciences. He seems to have used his knowledge chiefly to amaze the vulgar, and challenge ignorant adoration. What remains of his writing-and the prose he set down upon sheepskins, as the Ionians were wont to do before they got papyrus from Egypt, is worth notice as the earliest extant specimen of Greek prose-allies him with the Orphic theologers rather than with the philosophers. The only decided tribute to his greatness is preserved by Cicero and confirmed by previous tradition: that he was the first of the sages who plainly and

unequivocally declared the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

6

The first public appearance of Pythagoras, and his alleged earliest assumption of that title of philosopher which was afterwards so famous, are recorded by Cicero. Having alluded to the seven wise men, the Eopo-by which term the earliest Greeks expressed their men of action as well as thought-he proceeds: "from whence all who were exercised in the contemplation of nature, were held to be, as well as called, wise men; and that name of theirs continued to the age of Pythagoras, who is reported to have gone to Phlius, and to have discoursed very learnedly and copiously on certain subjects, with Leon prince of the Phliasii. Leon, admiring his ingenuity and eloquence, asked him what art he particularly professed; his answer was, that he was acquainted with no art, but that he was A Philosopher. Leon, surprised at the novelty of the name, inquired what he meant by the name of philosopher, and in what they differed from other men: on which Pythagoras replied: That the life of man seemed to him to resemble those games, which were kept with the greatest entertainment of sports, and the general concourse of all Greece. For as there were some, whose pursuit was glory and the honours of a crown, so others were merely induced by gain: but there was likewise one sort, whose aim was neither applause nor profit, but who came merely as spectators through curiosity, to remark what was done, and to see in what manner things were carried on there. Thus we come from another life and nature, unto this; as it were out of another city, to some much-frequented mart; some slaves to glory, others to money: but there are some few, who, taking no account of any thing else, earnestly look into the nature of things: these call themselves studious of wisdom, that is, philosophers: and as there it is more reputable to be a looker-on, without making any acquisition, so in life, the contemplating on things, and acquainting yourself with them, greatly exceeds every other pursuit of life.' Nor was Pythagoras," it is justly added by Cicero, "the inventor only of the name, but he enlarged also the thing itself." So did he enlarge it indeed, that the truth of this tradition, beautiful as it is in itself, is more than questionable. Contemplation was with him no more the highest aim of life, than as it should directly lead to the highest and most perfect order of Action. It was in the combination of both he saw the triumph of philosophy. Holding, in that respect, the opinion of the wisest man of two thousand years' later date, who said that, "in this theatre of man's life, God and angels only should be lookers-on:

* Lord Bacon.

**

that knowledge is never so dignified and exalted, as when contemplation and action are nearly and strongly conjoined together: a conjunction like that of the two highest planets; Saturn, the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the planet of civil society and action."

In what way the vast discoveries of Pythagoras originated, is now for ever lost. All we can with certainty judge is the impress of striking originality, of the growth of true Greek Mind, borne by the system. His great guiding principle was in all probability the one bond, by which he would have established the connexion of physics and ethics: his perception of the inner virtue, by which he taught that all mundane phenomena were only subservient in reality to moral ends and designs. It is certain that he absolutely attained to a just conception of the general disposition of the parts of the solar system, and the place held by the earth in it: nay, had even, according to some accounts, raised his views so far as to speculate on the attraction of the sun as the bond of its union. The universe was with him an harmonious whole, consisting (according to a plan of Decades) of ten great bodies revolving around a common centre agreeably to harmonious laws: whence he derived the music of the spheres, and explained the symbolical lyre of Apollo. Diogenes Laertius has preserved the traditions of his belief in the diurnal rotation as well as the annual revolution of the earth, the central position of the sun (in its primary form as the central fire), and the revolutions of the planets: to which he added a just idea of the nature of comets; first maintained such truths as that the evening and morning star were the same body; and is said to have taught even the probable existence of other systems, of which the fixed stars were the suns. Aristotle's language is explicit, as far as it goes. "Most of those," he remarks, "who assert that the whole concave is finite, say that the earth is situated in the middle point of the universe: those who are called Pythagoreans, who live in Italy, are of a contrary opinion. For they say that fire is in the centre, and that the earth, which, according to them, is one of the stars, occasions the change of day and night by its own motion, with which it is carried about the centre." Nor is his evidence directed, as it might have been by this passage, to the mere theory of the diurnal motion of the earth: a little further on (it is in the second book, De Colo) he adds: "Some, as we have said, make the earth to be one of the stars; others say that it is placed in the centre of the universe, and revolves on a central axis."

The principle or method of investigation which he used, was, beyond doubt, as with Thales, a simple but steady attention to nature and inquiry into facts. He is said to have ascended from

the observation, that a musical string gives the same sound with another of twice the length, if the latter be straightened by four times the weight that straightens the former,-to the result, that the gravity of a planet is four times that of another which is at twice the distance. From the same method of reflection proeeeded his discovery of what is called the musical canon (the monochord), universally attributed to him: and but one of the many scientific truths of every-day interest and application derived from the same source. Arithmetic he venerated as the key to mathematics, and our common multiplication-table is to this day called Pythagorean. It is on record also that he offered the solemn sacrifice of a hecatomb on discovering the fundamental theorem of geometry-that in every right-angled triangle the square of the largest side is equal to the sum of the squares of the two shorter ones. Even in the most mystical and fanciful notions of numerical combinations that are commonly said to have been held by him, there lay a subtle tendency to truth. It would be difficult not to recognise their connexion, and that by no means remote, with the chemical doctrine of the combination of all material elements in certain definite numerical proportions.

But this part of the philosophy of Pythagoras requires a careful discrimination. It seems to have been the scheme of his physics to resolve all the sensible qualities into certain mathematical forms, issuing from a Primal Unit: which Unit he considered as the formal as well as material basis of all things, and as identical with the One Supreme Being, or God. So based, the fundamental doctrines of the system appear shortly to have been: That the essence of all things rests upon a numerical relation; that the world subsists by the harmony, or conformity, of its different elements; and that numbers are the principle of all that exists. In giving this real objective existence to numbers, he is supposed to have confounded a numerical unit with a geometrical point, and this again with a material atom:* a kind of confusion, however, which would yet imply a more rigid method of investigation than the recent historian of Inductive Science seems inclined to concede to him. Mr. Whewell argues that, in representing the essential properties and attributes of things by the relations of number, it is not a necessary, and hardly a fair consequence, that the existence of objects distinct from the existence of all their properties and qualities should be assumed to have been also brought in question. But the argument leaves us with precisely the same reason as before to believe, that the numerical speculations of Pythagoras may have been in many cases really combined with the doctrine of atoms.

* See Thirlwall's History of Greece, vol. ii., page 142.

It would be impossible altogether to exclude that suspicion, in giving any reality to his view of numbers as the actual elements out of which the universe was constructed. Premising that our authority is in the writings of Philolaus, a much later disciple of the school,* and who is likely to have inherited all its external mysticism, with perhaps but a small part of its inner wisdom,the broad detail of the Pythagorean plan of the universe would seem to have been this. Beginning, it is probable, from observation of the periodical occurrences of nature, and those numerical relations on which so many of the Greek institutions and religious observances were founded, and which were likely to have conducted him to a metaphysical analysis of the general ideas of relation,-Pythagoras traced up the various forms and phenomena of the world to numbers as their basis and essence: whence, ascending further to the principles of numbers themselves, he conceived them in the form of contrasting pairs: of which Aristotle (in his Metaphysics) enumerates ten, describing them as according to some Pythagoreans the most important elements of the universe, while for himself he characterizes them as but ten different aspects of one vague idea. They were-Limit and Unlimited: Odd and Even: One and Many: Right and Left: Male and Female: Still and Moved: Straight and Curve: Light and Darkness: Good and Evil: Square and Oblong. Following up contrasts probably of this nature, Pythagoras himself is said to have arrived at his one first principle and element-his Unit†-which included both the even and the odd, and harmonised All in One: immediately advancing to it, however, through what he called the triad, or number of the whole; so called because it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And thus Plato afterwards conducted his celebrated argument of unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity, on which he based his philosophy. "You cannot," he said, "have the idea of one thing, without the notion of three things also. The thing itself, another thing which is not it, and a third thing between them: for if there were nothing between, they would be one, not two. Neither can you see two things, and something between them: that is, see in the whole, three things, without conceiving of them as one: for the third thing connects and binds together the two extremes." So had it been that Py

μονάς.

* 420 B. C. This is in his refutation of a doctrine of the Eleatic school hereafter to be described, that All is One: where the argument, as it appears in the Sophist and the Parmenides, may be thus given in abstract: "That although entity may be posited as a plurality of things-for example, as warm and cold-its unity nevertheless is not therefore denied; for the warm and cold are both alike a being, in such a manner that both―inasmuch as being is not posited as a third something, independ