CHAP. XII. EGYPTIAN NUMBERS. 195 



Without entering into all the abstruse specu- 

 hitions respecting numbers, I shall add a few obser- 

 vations, principally in reference to the opinions en- 

 tertained by the Egyptians. 



" According to their doctrine, Thales defined 

 numbers to be a collection of monads ; " and 

 "some of the Pythagoreans said that the monad 

 was the confine of number and parts ; for from it, 

 as from a seed, and an eternal root, ratios are con- 

 trarily increased and diminished ; some through a 

 division to infinity being always diminished by 

 a greater number, while others being increased to 

 infinity are again augmented." * They also " called 

 the monad intellect, male and female, God, chaos, 

 darkness, Tartarus, Lethe, the axis, the Sun, and 

 Pyralios, Morpho, the tower of Jupiter, Apollo, 

 the prophet," and many other names ; and Da- 

 mascius, in his treatise Tlspi Ap;^c«v, informs us that 

 " the Egyptians asserted nothing of the tirst prin- 

 ciple of things, but celebrated it as a thrice un- 

 known darkness transcending all intellectual per- 

 ception." To the duad they gave the appellation 

 "audacity, matter, the cause of dissimilitude, the 

 interval between multitude and the monad," 

 ascribing it to Diana and some other Deities, to 

 Fate and Death ; and the triad was considered by 

 them to be intellect, the origin of virtue, and to 

 belong to Justice, Saturn t, and many other Di- 



* Vide Taylor's Theoretic Arithmetic, p.-i.; and Aristotle. 



-|- This nuinber is observable in the " Tria virginis ora Diance," the 

 tritlent of Neptune, tlic " trifiJum fiilmen Jovis," the three sons of 

 Saturn, the three-headed Cerberus, the tliree Fates, the Graces, the 

 Furies, tiie three judges of Hades, and others. The e.xpression of Virgil 



O 2 



