240 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
In the absence of Pythagorean documents, and consequent upon 
the divergences of later disciples of the school, difficulty has been 
felt in getting at the exact meaning of Pythagoras himself. But 
when we remember his intense love of order, his inheritance of 
the Ionic craving after the ultimate basis of the manifold Kosmos, 
and his predisposition as an analytic mathematician to seek the 
ultimates of bodies in surfaces, of surfaces in lines, and of lines in 
points, it seems to me to be the most natural solution of his system 
to say, that, by some such process he found the Kosmos, in its last 
analysis, reducible to the one—all separate bodies being, formally 
at least, numbers—.e. determinate combinations of the ultimate 
unit. Whether his ultimate unit was what Plato would call the 
formal essence, or was a qguasi-material entity out of which the 
invisible was evolved, I do not now discuss. My purpose is to 
observe that in this theory we have substantially the germ of those 
of modern times, sanctioned by influential names, which either 
resolve all material bodies and elements into ultimate centres of 
force, or into the infinitely small atoms of which no quality save 
that of unity can be affirmed; nor is the goal reached by 
Pythagoras far removed from a well-attested molecular theory, 
which sees in molecules of different kinds fixed numerical combina- 
tions. 
Now, as then, the one is the basis of all. 
Take another system, that of Empedocles, who, rejecting both 
the Eleatic theory of Being and its opposite, the Heraclitean Flux, 
arrived at a primitive chaos of four eternal elements which, under 
the antagonistic action of diAta Kou véiKos, became now segregated 
into bodies, and now separated—cycle of segregation being fol- 
lowed by cycle of separation, according as diAia or véiKos Were in 
the ascendant. Now, making, as we ought, all due allowance for 
the poetical form into which Empedocles cast his thoughts of 
antagonistic forces, by the use of the terms ¢iAia and vetkos, we 
seem to have in this theory the first expression of what we know 
as the Nebular hypothesis, and also of those everlasting cycles of 
evolution and dissolution on which Mr. Herbert Spencer has 
descanted with no little eloquence. 
Take one more, the system of Leucippus and Democritus. 
Rejecting the four original substances of Empedocles, as also the 
nebulous mass of infinitely varied substances, out of which, under 
the potent action of the eternal vous, Anaxagoras built up the 
