Professor Burnet calls attention to the singular power exhibited by the Pythagoreans in adapting their theories to conditions; and among certain radical changes in their point of view, he thinks the most remarkable is the way the religious side of the doctrine was gradually dropped. “The effort was made to clear the name of Pythagoras himself from the imputation of mysticism. We have the echo of this in the remains of Aristoxenos and Dikairchos, but it must be older; for in their day scientific Pythagoreans had ceased to exist. The statement that Hippasos of Metapontium was guilty of publishing a mystic discourse ‘with the view of misrepresenting Pythagoras’ (Diogenes, viii, 7) must go back to this generation of the school; for at a later date no one would have any interest in making it.”[5] According to Stobaeus (_Eclogarum physicarum et ethicarum_, i, 308), Ecphantus--an immediate successor of Pythagoras, according to Röth--was the first philosopher to explain the Pythagorean monads (atoms) as something corporeal. But this view is regarded by most authorities as being contrary to the doctrine of the Pythagoreans. While Ecphantus is included among the disciples of the School, his doctrine of material atoms as the original constituents of the Pythagorean “numbers,” as well as of matter, cannot, according to Zeller, have been derived from his reputed master. Unlike the followers of Leucippus, Ecphantus believed, with Anaxagoras (500-428 B. C.), that the movement of the atoms (or monads), as well as the formation of the universe, was produced by mind or soul. Atoms, according to Ecphantus, differ among themselves in size, form and _force_. It is interesting to note that this philosopher had not only accepted as true the affirmation of Pythagoras that the earth is a sphere, but he knew also that it rotated upon its axis (Schiaparelli, “_I Precursori di Copernico nell’Antichita_,” in _Memorie del Reale Instituto Lombardi_, xii). Here, then, paradoxically enough, we find in the teachings of the idealistic Pythagoreans the roots of our modern theories of cosmogony and the atomic theory of matter. Their “particles” are qualitatively all alike, differing only in form. By changes in their number and position these qualitatively homogeneous atoms form all the various substances of earth, sea and sky. THE “SEEDS” OF ANAXAGORAS (500-428 B. C.) The “seeds” (or germs) of Anaxagoras must also, in a sense, be considered “atoms.” But, so far from being all alike fundamentally, for him each substance was supposed to be composed of its own peculiar particles, there being as many kinds of “seeds” as there are kinds of substances.