As in the case of the brotherhood copied from the Egyptian priesthood, so must we here set aside this oriental and un-Greek idea of the transmigration of souls. Both were too far removed from the Greek spirit to have had a place and a development there. With the Greeks, the consciousness of a higher, freer individuality has become too strong to allow any permanence to the idea of metempsychosis, according to which, man, this independent and self-sufficing Being, takes the form of a beast. They have, indeed, the conception of men as becoming springs of water, trees, animals, &c., but the idea of degradation which comes as a consequence of sin, lies at its root. Aristotle (De anim. I. 3) shortly and in his own manner deals with and annihilates this idea of the Pythagoreans. “They do not say for what reason soul dwells in body, nor how the latter is related to it. For owing to their unity of nature when one acts the other suffers: one moves and the other is moved, but none of this happens in what is mutually contingent. According to the Pythagorean myths any soul takes to any body, which is much like making architects take to flutes. For crafts must necessarily have tools and soul body; but each tool must have its proper form and kind.” It is implied in the transmigration of souls that the organization of the body is something accidental to the human soul; this refutation by Aristotle is complete. The eternal idea of metempsychosis had philosophic interest only as the inner Notion permeating all these forms, the oriental unity which appears in everything; we have not got this signification here, or at best we have but a glimmering of it. If we say that the particular soul is, as a definite thing, to wander about throughout all, we find firstly, that the soul is not a thing such as Leibnitz’ Monad, which, like a bubble in the cup of coffee, is possibly a sentient, thinking soul; in the second place an empty identity of the soul-thing such as this has no interest in relation to immortality. 3. _Practical Philosophy_. As regards the practical philosophy of Pythagoras, which is closely connected with what has gone before, there is but little that is philosophic known to us. Aristotle (Magn. Moral. I. 1) says of him that “he first sought to speak of virtue, but not in the right way, for, because he deduced the virtues from numbers, he could not form of them any proper theory.” The Pythagoreans adopted ten virtues as well as ten heavenly spheres. Justice, amongst others, is described as the number which is like itself in like manner (_ἴσακις ἴσος_); it is an even number, which remains even when multiplied with itself. Justice is pre-eminently what remains like itself; but this is an altogether abstract determination, which applies to much that is, and which does not exhaust the concrete, thus remaining quite indeterminate.