History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2): Revised EditionDraper, John William
History
History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2): Revised Edition
Draper, John William
Europe -- Civilization
elementary or compound, inorganic or organic, to which an expressive
number does not belong. Nay, even an archetypal form, as of man or any
other such composite structure, may thus possess a typical number, the
sum of the numbers of its constituent parts. It signifies nothing what
interpretation we give to these numbers, whether we regarded them as
atomic weights, or, declining the idea of atoms, consider them as the
representatives of force. As in the ancient philosophical doctrine, so
in modern science, the number is invariably connected with the name of a
thing, of whatever description the thing may be.
[Sidenote: Pythagorean physics and psychology.]
The grand standard of harmonical relation among the Pythagoreans was the
musical octave. Physical qualities, such as colour and tone, were
supposed to appertain to the surface of bodies. Of the elements they
enumerated five--earth, air, fire, water, and ether, connecting
therewith the fact that man has five organs of sense. Of the planets
they numbered five, which, together with the sun, moon, and earth, are
placed apart at distances determined by a musical law, and in their
movements through space give rise to a sound, the harmony of the
spheres, unnoticed by us because we habitually hear it. They place the
sun in the centre of the system, round which, with the other planets,
the earth revolves. At this point the geocentric doctrine is being
abandoned and the heliocentric takes its place. As the circle is the
most perfect of forms, the movements of the planets are circular. They
maintained that the moon is inhabited, and like the earth, but the
people there are taller than men, in the proportion as the moon's
periodic rotation is greater than that of the earth. They explained the
Milky Way as having been occasioned by the fall of a star, or as having
been formerly the path of the sun. They asserted that the world is
eternal, but the earth is transitory and liable to change, the universe
being in the shape of a sphere. They held that the soul of man is merely
an efflux of the universal soul, and that it comes into the body from
without. From dreams and the events of sickness they inferred the
existence of good and evil dæmons. They supposed that souls can exist
without the body, leading a kind of dream-life, and identified the motes
in the sunbeam with them. Their heroes and dæmons were souls not yet
become embodied, or who had ceased to be so. The doctrine of
transmigration which they had adopted was in harmony with such views,
and, if it does not imply the absolute immortality of the soul, at least
asserts its existence after the death of the body, for the disembodied
spirit becomes incarnate again as soon as it finds a tenement which fits
it. To their life after death the Pythagoreans added a doctrine of
retributive rewards and punishments, and, in this respect, what has been
said of animals forming a penitential mechanism in the theology of India
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