FROM THALES TO LUCRETIUS. g 



Anaximander, since these varied only in non-essen- 

 tials; or, like that of Pythagoras and his school, 

 which Zeller regards as the outcome of the teachings 

 of Anaximander, were purely abstract and fanciful. 

 As is well known, the Pythagoreans, whose philoso- 

 phy was ethical as well as cosmical, held that all 

 things are made of numbers, each of which they be- 

 lieved had its special character and property. A be- 

 lief in such symbols as entities seems impossible to 

 us, but its existence in early thought is conceivable 

 when, as Aristotle says, they were " not separated 

 from the objects of sense." Even in the present day, 

 among the eccentric people who still believe in the 

 modern sham agnosticism, known as theosophy, 

 and in astrology, we find the delusion that numbers 

 possess inherent magic or mystic virtues. So far as 

 the ancients are concerned, " consider," as Mr. Benn 

 remarks in his Greek Philosophers (vol. i, p. 12), " the 

 lively emotions excited at a time when multiplica- 

 tion and division, squaring and cubing, the rule of 

 three, the construction and equivalence of figures, with 

 all their manifold applications to industry, com- 

 merce, fine arts, and tactics, were just as strange and 

 wonderful as electrical phenomena are to us ... 

 and we shall cease to wonder that a mere form of 

 thought, a lifeless abstraction, should once have been 

 regarded as the solution of every problem; the cause 

 of all existence; or that these speculations were more 

 than once revived in after ages." 



Xenophanes of Colophon, one of the twelve 



