“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. Prominent among the followers of Pythagoras was EMPEDOCLES, of Agrigentum in Sicily (450 B.C.), who combined the previous theories of nature in his own, viz., that four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—enter into the constitution of the universe, and that these are constantly animated by the two opposing forces of Love and Strife. A peculiar doctrine of his was that like is perceived only by like; thus our knowledge of other bodies is due to minute emanations from their substance which enter the pores and impress corresponding elements in our own frames. Empedocles is said to have arrogated to himself the importance of a god, going about in a purple robe confined with a belt of gold, performing wonderful cures. According to an old legend, he sought to create the belief that he had been translated to heaven, by secretly throwing himself into the crater of Mt. Etna; but the volcano, in a subsequent eruption, cast forth one of his brazen sandals and so exposed the fraud. He probably lost his life by accident while examining the crater. From the Italic School sprung the sects known as Eleatic, Epicurean, and Skeptic. The Eleatic School was founded by XENOPH’ANES (600-500 B.C.), a contemporary of Pythagoras, and derived its name from the town of E’lea in southern Italy. Xenophanes asserted the unity of the Deity. “There is one god,” he said, “among gods and men the greatest: unlike to mortals in outward shape, unlike in mind and thoughts.” This was truly a sublime stand to take in an age of polytheism; he who feared not to face a superstitious people with such a doctrine, and ridicule even their divine Homer for his degrading pictures of the deities, deserves to be ranked among the greatest philosophers of Greece. FRAGMENTS FROM XENOPHANES. “If sheep, and swine, and lions strong, and all the bovine crew, Could paint with cunning hands, and do what clever mortals do, Depend upon it, every pig with snout so broad and blunt, Would make a Jove that like himself would thunder with a grunt; And every lion’s god would roar, and every bull’s would bellow, And every sheep’s would baa, and every beast his worshipped fellow Would find in some immortal form, and naught exist divine But had the gait of lion, sheep, or ox, or grunting swine.” * * * * *