ITS TECHNICAL FORMS. 77 



and as things were thus called after the Ideas, the Ideas had a priority 

 and pre-eminence assigned them. The Idea of Good, Beautiful, and 

 Wise was the "First Good," the "First Beautiful," the "First Wise." 

 This dignity aud distinction were ultimately carried to a large extent. 

 Those Ideas were described as eternal and self-subsisting, forming au 

 " Intelligible World," full of the models or archetypes of created things. 

 But it is not to our purpose here to consider the Platonic Ideas in their 

 theological bearings. In physics they were applied in the same form 

 as in morals. The primum calidum, primum frigidum were those 

 Ideas of fundamental Principles by participation of which, all tilings 

 were hot or cold. 



This school did not much employ itself in the development of its 

 principles as applied to physical inquiries : but we are not without 

 examples of such speculations. Plutarch's Treatise Ilspi tou Ilpwrou 

 Yu^pou, " On the First Cold," may be cited as one. It is in reality a 

 discussion of a question which has been agitated in modern times also ; 

 — whether cold be a positive quality or a mere privation. "Is there, 

 Favorinus," he begins, " a First Power and Essence of the Cold, as 

 Fire is of the Hot; by a certain presence and participation of which 

 all other things are cold : or is rather coldness a privation of heat, as 

 darkness is of light, and rest of motion ?" 



3. Technical Forms of the Pythagoreans. — The Numbers of the 

 Pythagoreans, when propounded as the explanation of physical phe- 

 nomena, as they were, are still more obscure than the Ideas of the Pla- 

 tonists. There were, indeed, considerable resemblances in the way in 

 which these two kinds of notions were spoken of. Plato called his 

 I 'has unities, monads ; and as, according to him, Ideas, so, according 

 to the Pythagoreans, Numbers, were the causes of things being what 

 they are. 28 But there was this difference, that things shared the nature 

 of the Platonic Ideas "by participation," while they shared the nature 

 of Pythagorean Numbers "by imitation." Moreover, the Pythago- 

 reans followed their notion out into much greater development than 

 any other school, investing particular numbers with extraordinary at- 

 tributes, and applying them by very strange and forced analogies. 

 Thus the number Four, to which they gave the name of Tetractys, 

 was held to be the most perfect number, and was conceived to corre- 

 spond to the human soul, in some way which appears to be very im- 

 perfectly understood by the commentators of this philosophy. 



« Arist. Metaph. i. 6. 



