That remark, with its reference to the laws and rhythm in the universe, calls to mind the great initiator, so far as our knowledge extends back, of scientific research in our European world. Pythagoras is a dim figure, and there is no need here to insist unduly on his significance. But there is not the slightest doubt about the nature of that significance in its bearing on the point before us. Dim and legendary as he now appears to us, Pythagoras was no doubt a real person, born in the sixth century before Christ, at Samos, and by his association with that great shipping centre doubtless enabled to voyage afar and glean the wisdom of the ancient world. In antiquity he was regarded, Cicero remarks, as the inventor of philosophy, and still to-day he is estimated to be one of the most original figures, not only of Greece, but the world. He is a figure full of interest from many points of view, however veiled in mist, but he only concerns us here because he represents the beginning of what we call “science”—that is to say, measurable knowledge at its growing point—and because he definitely represents it as arising out of what we all conventionally recognise as “art,” and as, indeed, associated with the spirit of art, even its most fantastic forms, all the way. Pythagoras was a passionate lover of music, and it was thus that he came to make the enormously fruitful discovery that pitch of sound depends upon the length of the vibrating chord. Therein it became clear that law and spatial quantity ruled even in fields which had seemed most independent of quantitative order. The beginning of the great science of mechanics was firmly set up. The discovery was no accident. Even his rather hostile contemporary Heraclitus said of Pythagoras that he had “practised research and inquiry beyond all other men.” He was certainly a brilliant mathematician; he was, also, not only an astronomer, but the first, so far as we know, to recognise that the earth is a sphere,—so setting up the ladder which was to reach at last to the Copernican conception,—while his followers took the further step of affirming that the earth was not the centre of our cosmic system, but concentrically related. So that Pythagoras may not only be called the Father of Philosophy, but, with better right the Father of Science in the modern exact sense. Yet he remained fundamentally an artist even in the conventional sense. His free play of imagination and emotion, his delight in the ravishing charm of beauty and of harmony, however it may sometimes have led him astray,—and introduced the reverence for Number which so long entwined fancy too closely with science,—yet, as Gomperz puts it, gave soaring wings to the power of his severe reason.[31]