FROM THE GOLDEN VERSES.
“Ne’er suffer sleep thine eyes to close
Before thy mind hath run
O’er every act, and thought, and word,
From dawn to set of sun;
For wrong take shame, but grateful feel,
If just thy course hath been;
Such effort, day by day renewed,
Will ward thy soul from sin.”
As the Ionics made physics everything, so the Pythagoreans regarded mathematical science as the summum bonum. In their master’s eyes the world was “a living arithmetic,” and virtue a proportion of all the faculties of the soul. A mystical relation between mathematical and moral truths was a principle of his philosophy.