{29} [78] Music had great attractions for Pythagoras, not only for its soothing and refining effects, but for the intellectual interest of its numerical relations. Reference has already been made (see above, p. 27) to their quaint doctrine of the music of the spheres; and the same idea of rhythmic harmony pervaded the whole system. The life of the soul was a harmony; the virtues were perfect numbers; and the influence of music on the soul was only one instance among many of the harmonious relations of things throughout the universe. Thus we have Pythagoras described as soothing mental afflictions, and bodily ones also, by rhythmic measure and by song. With the morning's dawn he would be astir, harmonising his own spirit to his lyre, and chanting ancient hymns of the Cretan Thales, of Homer, and of Hesiod, till all the tremors of his soul were calmed and still.
Night and morning also he prescribed for himself and his followers an examination, as it were a tuning and testing of oneself. At these times especially was it meet for us to take account of our soul and its doings; in the evening to ask, "Wherein have I transgressed? What done? What failed to do?" In the morning, "What must I do? Wherein repair past days' forgetfulness?"
But the first duty of all was truth,—truth to one's own highest, truth to the highest beyond us. Through truth alone could the soul approach the divine. {30} Falsehood was of the earth; the real life of the soul must be in harmony with the heavenly and eternal verities.
Pythagoreanism remained a power for centuries throughout the Greek world and beyond. All subsequent philosophies borrowed from it, as it in its later developments borrowed from them; and thus along with them it formed the mind of the world, for further apprehensions, and yet more authentic revelations, of divine order and moral excellence.
{31}
CHAPTER IV
THE ELEATICS
God and nature—Knowledge and opinion—Being and evolution—Love the creator—The modern egotism
[79]
I. XENOPHANES.—Xenophanes was a native of Colophon, one of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, but having been forced at the age of twenty-five to leave his native city owing to some political revolution, he wandered to various cities of Greece, and ultimately to Zancle and Catana, Ionian colonies in Sicily, and thence to Elea or Velia, a Greek city on the coast of Italy. This city had, like Miletus, reached a high pitch of commercial prosperity, and like it also became a centre of philosophic teaching. For there Xenophanes remained and founded a school, so that he and his successors received the name of Eleatics. His date is uncertain; but he seems to have been contemporary with Anaximander [80] and Pythagoras, and to have had some knowledge of the doctrine of both. He wrote in various poetic measures, using against the poets, and especially against Homer and Hesiod, their own weapons, to [83] denounce their anthropomorphic theology. If oxen {32} or lions had hands, he said, they would have fashioned gods after their likeness which would have been as [85] authentic as Homer's. As against these poets, and the popular mythology, he insisted that God must be one, eternal, incorporeal, without beginning or ending. [87] As Aristotle strikingly expresses it, "He looked forth over the whole heavens and said that God is one, [88] that that which is one is God." The favourite antitheses of his time, the definite and the indefinite, movable and immovable, change-producing and by change produced—these and such as these, he maintained, were inapplicable to the eternally and [86] essentially existent. In this there was no partition of organs or faculties, no variation or shadow of turning; the Eternal Being was like a sphere, everywhere equal; everywhere self-identical.