[HARVEY] PYTHAGORAS AND HIS PHILOSOPHY 2S7 



the people of Crotona eventually rose in tumult were not, as say our 

 modern writers, of the Doric type, by which I understand varieties of 

 monarchical rule, as at Lacedsemon, but of Brahmin type, and the 

 attempt to found a superior caste failed of success. Meditation, abstin- 

 ence, silence — all characteristics of the Indian sages — do not appeal 

 to the active Western mind. The method of holding possessions in 

 common, a primitive custom, still prevailing among our American 

 Indians, was dying out in Europe, and though re-introduced under other 

 auspices, has given rise to other tumults and will yet do so. The 

 prohibition of killing anything endowed with life is so clearly Indian 

 that we need only think of some of its Eastern forms to-day, where 

 certain holy men carry peacocks' feathers to brush the place they wish 

 to sit upon, lest haply they should crush some insect. Metempsychosis, 

 which Pythagoras taught, is held as firmly as ever, both by Brahmin 

 and Buddhist. We may alsoi see clearly that P}^thagoras was an 

 adherent of monism, not dualism. There is no trace in his philosophy 

 of the chief elements of Semitic faiths and of the later Zoroastrianism, 

 viz., the presence throughout Creation and the created universe of a 

 principle or spirit of evil, which is not an Aryan belief, not Indian or 

 early Persian, but was ingrafted on Mazdeism by the political needs 

 of the Empire of Camhyses and Darius Hystaspes, characterized, the 

 Mithraitic system, and was fastened on Europe by the adoption of the 

 Jewish scriptures. The Indian solution of the difficulty this question 

 raises was the denial of the existence of matter or takino- matter 

 and spirit to be fundamentally one. The evil spirit is the Sanscrit 

 Bhaga, master; an epithet of God, the name of a Vedic divinity. It 

 seems to have been transferred to the Slavonic bogû (and is, perhaps, 

 the bogy of our nurseries) by the influence of the Turanian races with 

 whom they mingled. Zoroaster II represents it as the devil. 



To prove in like manner that Pythagoras adopted his astronomy 

 from the East, it would be needful to show what Eastern science 

 taught, but of this we know very little. The Egyptians knew that 

 the earth was round, and there can be very little doubt that a 

 people who oriented their monuments to paaticular stars knew of the 

 regular change in their position due to the precession of the equinoxes, 

 though Maspero says that up to this time no old text has been found to 

 prove such knowledge. So of the rotation and revolution of the earth, 

 " Some said the earth was stationary, but Philolaus, the Pythagorean, 

 said it was carried round in a circle about the central fire, like the 

 sun and the moon." How could Pythagoras have obtained even such 

 a glimpse except from a people who built observatories ? These existed. 



Sec. II., 1904. 17 



