A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



sons is not at all in question, but much that is merely 

 traditional has come to be associated with their names. 

 Pythagoras was the senior, and doubtless his ideas 

 may have influenced the others more or less, though 

 each is usually spoken of as the founder of an inde- 

 pendent school. Much confusion has all along existed, 

 however, as to the precise ideas which were to be as- 

 cribed to each of the leaders. Numberless commenta- 

 tors, indeed, have endeavored to pick out from among 

 the traditions of antiquity, aided by such fragments 

 of the writing of the philosophers as have come down 

 to us, the particular ideas that characterized each 

 thinker, and to weave these ideas into systems. But 

 such efforts, notwithstanding the mental energy that 

 has been expended upon them, were, of necessity, 

 futile, since, in the first place, the ancient philosophers 

 themselves did not specialize and systematize their 

 ideas according to modern notions, and, in the second 

 place, the records of their individual teachings have 

 been too scantily preserved to serve for the purpose of 

 classification. It is freely admitted that fable has 

 woven an impenetrable mesh of contradictions about 

 the personalities of these ancient thinkers, and it would 

 be folly to hope that this same artificer had been less 

 busy with their beliefs and theories. When one reads 

 that Pythagoras advocated an exclusively vegetable 

 diet, yet that he was the first to train athletes on meat 

 diet ; that he sacrificed only inanimate things, yet that 

 he offered up a hundred oxen in honor of his great dis- 

 covery regarding the sides of a triangle, and such like 

 inconsistencies in the same biography, one gains a 

 realizing sense of the extent to which diverse traditions 



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