It is not within our purpose to discuss minutely the scientific or theological theories of Pythagoras. In accordance with the abstruse speculative character of the Ionic school of science, which inclined to refer the origin of the universe to some one primordial principle, he was led by his mathematical predilections to discover the cosmic element in numbers, or proportion--a theory which savours of John Dalton’s philosophy, now accepted in chemistry, and a virtual enunciation of what we now call _quantitative_ science. Pythagoras taught the Kopernican theory prematurely. He regarded the sun as more _divine_ than the earth, and therefore set it in the _centre_ of the earth and planets. The argument was surely a mark of genius, but it was too transcendental for his contemporaries, even for Plato and Aristotle. His elder contemporary, the celebrated Thales of Miletus, with whom in his early youth he may have been acquainted, may claim, indeed, to be the remote originator of the famous nebular hypothesis of Laplace and modern astronomy. Another cardinal doctrine of the Pythagorean school was the musical, from whence the idea, so popular with the poets, of the “music of the spheres.” To music was attributed the greatest influence in the control of the passions. In its larger sense, by the Greeks generally, the term “Music” (_Musice_--pertaining to the Muses) denoted, it is to be remembered, not alone the “concord of sweet sounds,” but also an artistic and æsthetic education in general--all humanising and refining instruction.