Pherecydes has also to be mentioned as the teacher of Pythagoras; he is of Syros, one of the Cyclades islands. He is said to have drawn water from a spring, and to have learned therefrom that an earthquake would take place in three days; he is also said to have predicted of a ship in full sail that it would go down, and it sank in a moment. Theopompus in Diogenes Laertius (I. 116), relates of this Pherecydes that “he first wrote to the Greeks about Nature and the gods” (which was before said of Anaximander). His writings are said to have been in prose, and from what is related of them it is clear that it must have been a theogony of which he wrote. The first words, still preserved to us, are: “Jupiter and Time and what is terrestrial (χθών) were from eternity (εἰς ἀεί); the name of earthly (χθονίῃ) was given to the terrestrial sphere when Zeus granted to it gifts.”[29] How it goes on is not known, but this cannot be deemed a great loss. Hermias tells us only this besides:[30] “He maintained Zeus or Fire (αἰθέρα), Earth and Chronos or Time as principles—fire as active, earth as passive, and time as that in which everything originates.” Diogenes of Apollonia, Hippasus, and Archelaus are also called Ionic philosophers, but we know nothing more of them than their names, and that they gave their adherence to one principle or the other.
We shall leave these now and go on to Pythagoras, who was a contemporary of Anaximander; but the continuity of the development of the principle of physical philosophy necessitated our taking Anaximenes with him. We see that, as Aristotle said, they placed the first principle in a form of matter—in air and water first, and then, if we may so define Anaximander’s matter, in an essence finer than water and coarser than air. Heraclitus, of whom we have soon to speak, first called it fire. “But no one,” as Aristotle (Metaph. I. 8) remarks, “called earth the principle, because it appears to be the most complex element” (διὰ τὴν μεγαλομέρειαν); for it seems to be an aggregate of many units. Water, on the contrary, is the one, and it is transparent; it manifests in sensuous guise the form of unity with itself, and this is also so with air, fire, matter, &c. The principle has to be one, and hence must have inherent unity with itself; if it shows a manifold nature as does the earth, it is not one with itself, but manifold. This is what we have to say about the early Ionic Philosophy. The importance of these poor abstract thoughts lies (a) in the comprehension of a universal substance in everything, and (b) in the fact that it is formless, and not encumbered by sensuous ideas.
No one recognized better the deficiencies in this philosophy than did Aristotle in the work already quoted. Two points appear in his criticism of these three modes of determining the absolute: “Those who maintain the original principle to be matter fall short in many ways. In the first place, they merely give the corporeal element and not the incorporeal, for there also is such.” In treating of nature in order to show its essence, it is necessary to deal with it in its entirety, and everything found in it must be considered. That is certainly but an empirical instance. Aristotle maintains the incorporeal to be a form of things opposed to the material, and indicates that the absolute must not be determined in a one-sided manner; because the principle of these philosophers is material only, they do not manifest the incorporeal side, nor is the object shown to be Notion. Matter is indeed itself immaterial as this reflection into consciousness; but such philosophers do not know that what they express is an existence of consciousness. Thus the first great defect here rests in the fact that the universal is expressed in a particular form.
Secondly, Aristotle says (Metaph. I. 3): “From this it may be seen that first cause has only been by all these expressed in the form of matter. But because they proceeded thus, the thing itself opened out their way for them, and forced them into further investigation. For whether origin and decay are derived from one or more, the question alike arises, ‘How does it happen and what is the cause of it?’ For the fundamental substance (τὸ ὑποκείμενον) does not make itself to change, just as neither wood nor metal are themselves the cause of change; wood neither forms a bed nor does brass a statue, but something else is the cause of the change. To investigate this, however, is to investigate the other principle, which, as we would say, is the Principle of Motion.” This criticism holds good even now, where the Absolute is represented as the one fixed substance. Aristotle says that change is not conceivable out of matter as such, or out of water not itself having motion; he reproaches the older philosophers for the fact that they have not investigated the principle of motion for which men care most. Further, object is altogether absent; there is no determination of activity. Hence Aristotle says in the former passage: “In that they undertake to give the cause of origin and decay, they in fact remove the cause of movement. Because they make the principle to be a simple body (earth being excepted), they do not comprehend the mutual origination and decay whereby the one arises out of the other: I am here referring to water, air, fire, and earth. This origination is to be shown as separation or as union, and hence the contradiction comes about that one in time comes earlier than the other. That is, because this kind of origination is the method which they have adopted, the way taken is from the simple universal, through the particular, to the individual as what comes latest. Water, air, and fire are, however, universal. Fire seems to be most suitable for this element, seeing that it is the most subtle. Thus those who made it to be the principle, most adequately gave expression to this method (λόγῳ) of origination; and others thought very similarly. For else why should no one have made the earth an element, in conformity with the popular idea? Hesiod says that it was the original body—so ancient and so common was this idea. But what in Becoming comes later, is the first in nature.” However, these philosophers did not understand this so, because they were ruled by the process of Becoming only, without again sublating it, or knowing that first formal universal as such, and manifesting the third, the totality or unity of matter and form, as essence. Here, we see, the Absolute is not yet the self-determining, the Notion turned back into itself, but only a dead abstraction; the moderns were the first, says Aristotle, (Metaph. I. 6; III. 3) to understand the fundamental principle more in the form of genus.
We are able to follow the three moments in the Ionic philosophy: (α) The original essence is water; (β) Anaximander’s infinite is descriptive of movement, simple going out of and coming back into the simple, universal aspects of form—condensation and rarefaction; (γ) the air is compared to the soul. It is now requisite that what is viewed as reality should be brought into the Notion; in so doing we see that the moments of division, condensation, and rarefaction are not in any way antagonistic to the Notion. This transition to Pythagoras, or the manifestation of the real side as the ideal, is Thought breaking free from what is sensuous, and, therefore, it is a separation between the intelligible and the real.
[B. Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans.]
The later Neo-Pythagoreans have written many extensive biographies of Pythagoras, and are especially diffuse as regards the Pythagorean brotherhood. But it must be taken into consideration that these often distorted statements must not be regarded as historical. The life of Pythagoras thus first comes to us in history through the medium of the ideas belonging to the first centuries after Christ, and more or less in the style in which the life of Christ is written, on the ground of ordinary actuality, and not in a poetic atmosphere; it appears to be the intermingling of many marvellous and extravagant tales, and to take its origin in part from eastern ideas and in part from western. In acknowledging the remarkable nature of his life and genius and of the life which he inculcated on his followers, it was added that his dealings were not with right things, and that he was a magician and one who had intercourse with higher beings. All the ideas of magic, that medley of unnatural and natural, the mysteries which pervade a clouded, miserable imagination, and the wild ideas of distorted brains, have attached themselves to him.
However corrupt the history of his life, his philosophy is as much so. Everything engendered by Christian melancholy and love of allegory has been identified with it. The treatment of Plato in Christian times has quite a different character. Numbers have been much used as the expression of ideas, and this on the one hand has a semblance of profundity. For the fact that another significance than that immediately presented is implied in them, is evident at once; but how much there is within them is neither known by him who speaks nor by him, who seeks to understand; it is like the witches’ rhyme (one time one) in Goethe’s “Faust.” The less clear the thoughts, the deeper they appear; what is most essential, but most difficult, the expression of oneself in definite conceptions, is omitted. Thus Pythagoras’ philosophy, since much has been added to it by those who wrote of it, may similarly appear as the mysterious product of minds as shallow and empty as they are dark. Fortunately, however, we have a special knowledge of the theoretic, speculative side of it, and that, indeed, from Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus, who have taken considerable trouble with it. Although later Pythagoreans disparage Aristotle on account of his exposition, he has a place above any such disparagement, and therefore to them no attention must be given.
In later times a quantity of writings were disseminated and foisted upon Pythagoras. Diogenes Laertius (VIII. 6, 7) mentions many which were by him, and others which were set down to him in order to obtain authority for them. But in the first place we have no writings by Pythagoras, and secondly it is doubtful whether any ever did exist. We have quotations from these in unsatisfactory fragments, not from Pythagoras, but from Pythagoreans. It cannot be decisively determined which developments and interpretations belonged to the ancients and which to the moderns; yet with Pythagoras and the ancient Pythagoreans the determinations were not worked out in so concrete a way as later.
As to the life of Pythagoras, we hear from Diogenes Laertius (VIII. 1-3, 45) that he flourished about the 60th Olympiad (540 B.C.). His birth is usually placed in the 49th or 50th Olympiad (584 B.C.); by Larcher in Tennemann (Vol. I., pp. 413, 414), much earlier—in the 43rd Olympiad (43, 1, i.e. 608 B.C.). He was thus contemporaneous with Thales and Anaximander. If Thales’ birth were in the 38th Olympiad and that of Pythagoras in the 43rd, Pythagoras was only twenty-one years younger than he; he either only differed by a couple of years from Anaximander (Ol. 42, 3) in age, or the latter was twenty-six years older. Anaximenes was from twenty to twenty-five years younger than Pythagoras. His birthplace was the Island of Samos, and hence he belonged to the Greeks of Asia Minor, which place we have hitherto found to be the seat of philosophy. Pythagoras is said by Herodotus (IV., 93 to 96) to have been the son of Mnesarchus, with whom Zalmoxis served as slave in Samos; Zalmoxis obtained freedom and riches, became ruler of the Getæ, and asserted that he and his people would not die. He built a subterranean habitation and there withdrew himself from his subjects; after four years he re-appeared;[31] hence the Getans believed in immortality. Herodotus thinks, however, that Zalmoxis was undoubtedly much older than Pythagoras.