OF THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 5 1 



Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes. They simply abstracted from the 

 individual, the infinitely varied forms of natural phenomena, and 

 tried to fix upon one basal material element as the the ground of all. 

 Thales made the element water. " All comes from water, to water 

 all returns." Anaximander spoke simply of a chaotic, primeval 

 matter, infinite, indefinite. Anaximenes made air the original ele- 

 ment. The value of these first efforts was of course simply zero, 

 excepting that they were the first efforts at anything like philosophy. 

 No parent despises the first efforts of his child at walking or speaking. 



After the Ionian Hylicists, the next mode of thought is that of 

 the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras of Samos, is said to have flourished 

 between 540 and 600 B. C. If all is true that is said about him he 

 was certainly a wonderful man, but the difficulty here is to separate 

 the romantic from the historical. The process of abstraction was 

 begun by the lonians, but they stopped at some material basis, 

 something which still had quality, which was yet sensuous. The 

 Pythagoreans carried the abstracting process still further, and looked 

 away entirely from the qualitatitve character of matter to its quanti- 

 tative character, its quantitative measure and relations. They 

 directed their thought, not to the material and sensuous, but to the 

 form and order of things in space. Their member theory exalted 

 the ideas of form, proportion, harmony, symmetry ; they made these 

 the fundamental things. The world, the soul, virtue, are all based 

 on number, proportion. Hence " the music of the spheres." It is 

 not easy to say exactly how much they meant by this. 



And now abstraction is carried a step further yet. The lonians 

 still cling to quality ; the Pythagoreans excluded quality and stopped 

 at quantity; the Eleatics, who come next, abstracted from both 

 quality and quantity, from all suchness, from all dividedness in space 

 or time, and said, " Only pure being is." There is no such thing as 

 becoming, distinction for this from that, division into parts. The one is, 

 the many are not. All variety and change that appears is so much 

 deception, only a seeming, it has no reality. All truth is told when 

 you have spoken of pure being, one, immutable, all-embracing. 

 The names here are, Xenophanes, Parmenideas of Elea (hence 

 the Eleatic school), and Zeno, well known to us all by his puzzles or 

 antinomies whereby he sought to demonstrate the absurdity and 

 impossibiUty of the division of matter, or of movement in space. 



