PYTH AGORAS, I. A famous early Greek philosopher, about 540-510 B.C., was a native of Samos, and son of Mnesarchus. After being well educated in poetry, music, eloquence, and astronomy, he proceeded abroad, and is said to have travelled not merely in Egypt, but far in the East ; return ing to Greece, he received great honours at the Olympic games, where he was saluted publicly as 2octilarlic (in the sense of wise man), but he declined the appellation, and assumed, in preference, that of quAtioopoy (friend if wisdom). After visiting the various states of Greece, he withdrew to southern Italy, and settled at Crotona, where he founded a fra ternity of 300 members,—the Pythagorean Brotherhood, bound by vows to conform to the religious theories and ascetic life of Pytha goras, and devote themselves to the study of his religious and philosophical theories. Simi. lar fraternities, whose members had secret signs or words for mutual recognition, were established in the other cities of southern Italy ; but, at CrotSna, the people rose against them and burnt their house, when only the younger monks escaped ; and in other places they were equally unpopular. Pythagoras is said by some to have perished in the fire at Crotona with his disciples, but by others to have fled to Tarentum, and thence to Meta pontum, where he starved himself; however, little is really known personally of himself or his doctrines. The latter arc chiefly inferred from the system of his followers, the Pytha goreans, among whom there was an absence of individuality, though in Aristotle's time divergences of doctrine occurred among them.
The chief Pythagorean is Philolaus, the con temporary of Socrfites, but Plato was con siderably tinged with Pythagoreanism, which he is said to have eventually adopted. The development of the Ionic philosophy—Thales, Anaximander, Anaxime'nes— was towards the abstraction of Matter from all else, but this process was directed solely to the determined quality of matter. Pythagoras, a metaphy
sical and geometrical rather than a physical philosopher, carried this abstraction higher, looking away from the sensible concretions of matter and its qualitative determinateness, as water, air, &c., and regarding only its quanti tative determinateness, its space-filling pro perty, i.e., Number, which is the principle (aNti1), or first cause, of Pythagoras ; but the ancients differ as to whether he held that things had their origin in Number, or that it was merely their archetype ; probably it was first regarded in the former light, and after wards in the latter. Of course the carrying out of this abstract principle into the province of the real could only lead to a fruitless sym bolism. The only value in this mysticism of numbers is the thought—at the bottom of it, but hidden under extravagant and vapid fancies—that there really are a rational order, harmony, and conformity to law in the pheno mena of nature, and that these laws of nature can be represented in measure and number. The Physics of the Pythagoreans possessed little value except Philolaus' doctrine respect ing the circular motion of the earth. All that is known of their Ethics refers to their canon of life, which, like the Orphic (both of them supposed by Herodaus to be chiefly derived from Egypt), was distinguished by a multi plicity of abstinences, disgusts, antipathies, in respect to food and other physical circum stances of life—elevated into rules of the most imperative force and necessity. Connected with this asceticism were their doctrines re specting the metempsychosis or transmigration of the soul, their view of the body as the soul's prison, their opposition to suicide, &c. a. A celebrated Greek statuary, of Rhegium, B.C.