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Updated: May 12, 2025
The Pythagoreans represented the origin of the world as the union of the two opposite principles of the illimitable and the limited, of the equal and the unequal. There was an attraction between the two principles, which was termed the act of breathing; hence the void entered into the world and separated things from each other.
I used to be told that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans almost natives of our country, who in old times had been called the Italian school of philosophers never doubted that we had souls drafted from the universal Divine intelligence.
I had hitherto regarded all Pythagoreans with the same scornful indifference which I accorded to the faith-curists; being a member of no particular church, I was scarcely prepared to take any of them seriously.
Posidonius, that it is a combination of fire, of finer substance than the stars, but denser than light. Some of the Pythagoreans say, that a comet is one of those stars which do not always appear, but after they have run through their determined course, they then rise and are visible to us.
To their life after death the Pythagoreans added a doctrine of retributive rewards and punishments, and, in this respect, what has been said of animals forming a penitential mechanism in the theology of India and Egypt, holds good for the Pythagoreans too.
None dare claim to belong to any recognized school, since the philosophers of the guild pride themselves on condemning the miracle-mongers. Now, in his youth, Caracalla went through his courses of philosophy. He detests Aristotle, and has always attached himself to Plato and the Pythagoreans.
Mosheim, writing on this subject, says: A pernicious maxim which was current in the schools, not only of the Egyptians, the Platonists, and the Pythagoreans, but also of the Jews, was very early recognised by the Christians, and soon found among them numerous patrons namely, that those who made it their business to deceive, with a view of promoting the cause of truth, were deserving rather of commendation than of censure.
It would take me too far afield to give an account of the Greek schools which immediately succeeded the Ionic: to tell of the Pythagoreans, who held that all things were constituted by numbers; of the Eleatics, who held that "only Being is," and denied the possibility of change, thereby reducing the shifting panorama of the things about us to a mere delusive world of appearances; of Heraclitus, who was so impressed by the constant flux of things that he summed up his view of nature in the words: "Everything flows"; of Empedocles, who found his explanation of the world in the combination of the four elements, since become traditional, earth, water, fire, and air; of Democritus, who developed a materialistic atomism which reminds one strongly of the doctrine of atoms as it has appeared in modern science; of Anaxagoras, who traced the system of things to the setting in order of an infinite multiplicity of different elements, "seeds of things," which setting in order was due to the activity of the finest of things, Mind.
I do not imitate the Pythagoreans, who close their gates; for I perceive that truth never ought to be a sealed fountain; but I cannot go into the Prytanaeum, the agoras, and the workshops, and jest, like Socrates, to captivate the attention of young men. When I thus seek to impart hidden treasures, I lose without receiving; and few perceive the value of what is offered.
This way of foretelling by names is not new; it was in old times celebrated and religiously observed by the Pythagoreans. Several great princes and emperors have formerly made good use of it.
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