stands apart from the other leaders of this first period of Hellenic free thought. The mathematical mind is often a prey to mysticism. And Pythagoras was the most powerful champion and apostle of Orphism, the founder of those secret societies that threatened the secular and the intellectual freedom of Hellas. Equally on its mystic as on its rationalistic side the Pythagorean teaching was in tendency inimical to the public religion of Greece, though the members of this sect appear always to have compromised with it. In the fragments of Xenophanes we find the most severe protests against the current religious conceptions of Hellas; his verses quoted by Clemens[89.2] polemise strongly against the folly of anthropomorphism, which is the master-passion of Greek polytheism; and if one or two of his quoted utterances seem to proclaim monotheism, it is clear that for his higher thought Godhead was not a person, but a cosmic principle or a noetic idea. On the whole the same account may be given of the religious theory of Herakleitos so far as this is revealed at all in the {90} fragments. It has indeed been recently maintained that he tolerated and found a place in his system for the contemporary polytheism;[90.1] but it is probably a truer view that he regarded it with half-disguised contempt and only used its terms and figures on occasion as literary expressions; while three of his fragments are scornful exclamations against the excesses of the Bacchic ritual, the methods of purification from blood, and the folly of idolatry.[90.2] Yet in this early speculation of the sixth century the parting of the ways has not yet been reached for physical science and religion; the cosmic theory is expressed in spiritual and animistic rather than in materialistic terms; for Empedokles Love and Strife are creative principles, in the view of Thales the magnet has a soul and all things are full of divine potencies. The great movement of Ionic thought was indeed adaptable to a high pantheistic or animistic creed, but not to the personal polytheism of the Hellenes, though most of the philosophers do not appear to have been vehement protestants. And at first their protests could have influenced only the minds of a few; not before the fifth century was the popular State-religion obliged to take notice of it.