The hermit-like homeless noble searcher for truth. Democritus and the Pythagoreans together find the basis of natural sciences. . . . . . . . . What are the causes which have interrupted a flourishing science of experimental physics in antiquity after Democritus? 7 Anaxagoras has taken from Heraclitus the idea that in every Becoming and in every Being the opposites are together. He felt strongly the contradiction that a body has many qualities and he _pulverised_ it in the belief that he had now dissolved it into its true qualities. . . . . . . . _Plato:_ first Heraclitean, later Sceptic: Everything, even Thinking, is in a state of flux. Brought through Socrates to the permanence of the good, the beautiful. These assumed as entitative. All generic ideals partake of the idea of the good, the beautiful, and they too are therefore _entitative_, _being_ (as the soul partakes of the idea of Life). The idea is _formless_. Through Pythagoras' metempsychosis has been answered the question: how we can know anything about the ideas. Plato's end: scepticism in Parmenides. Refutation of ideology. 8 CONCLUSION Greek thought during the _tragic age is pessimistic_ or _artistically optimistic_. Their judgment about _life_ implies more. The One, flight from the Becoming. _Aut_ unity, _aut_ artistic play. Deep distrust of reality: nobody assumes a good god, who has made everything _optime_. {Pythagoreans, religious sect. {Anaximander. {Empedocles. Eleates. {Anaxagoras. {Heraclitus. Democritus: the world without moral and æsthetic meaning, pessimism of chance. If one placed a tragedy before all these, the three former would see in it the mirror of the fatality of existence, Parmenides a transitory appearance, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras an artistic edifice and image of the world-laws, Democritus the result of machines. . . . . . . . With Socrates _Optimism_ begins, an optimism no longer artistic, with teleology and faith in the good god; faith in the enlightened good man. Dissolution of the instincts, Socrates breaks with the hitherto prevailing _knowledge_ and _culture;_ he intends returning to the old citizen-virtue and to the State. Plato dissociates himself from the State, when he observes that the State has become identical with the new Culture. The Socratic scepticism is a weapon against the hitherto prevailing culture and knowledge. ON TRUTH AND FALSITY IN THEIR ULTRAMORAL SENSE (1873)