hence he drew such conclusions as that "things are to each
man according as they seem to him." It was doubtless the recognition of
the unreliability of the senses that extorted from him the well-known
complaint: "Nothing can be known; nothing can be learned; nothing can be
certain; sense is limited; intellect is weak; life is short."

[Sidenote: Anaxagoras is persecuted.]

The biography of Anaxagoras is not without interest. Born in affluence,
he devoted all his means to philosophy, and in his old age encountered
poverty and want. He was accused by the superstitious Athenian populace
of Atheism and impiety to the gods, since he asserted that the sun and
moon consist of earth and stone, and that the so-called divine miracles
of the times were nothing more than common natural effects. For these
reasons, and also because of the Magianism of his doctrine--for he
taught the antagonism of mind and matter, a dogma of the detested
Persians--he was thrown into prison, condemned to death, and barely
escaped through the influence of Pericles. He fled to Lampsacus, where
he ended his days in exile. His vainglorious countrymen, however,
conferred honour upon his memory in their customary exaggerated way,
boasting that he was the first to explain the phases of the moon, the
nature of solar and lunar eclipses, that he had the power of foretelling
future events, and had even predicted the fall of a meteoric stone.

From the biography of Anaxagoras, as well as of several of his
contemporaries and successors, we may learn that a popular opposition
was springing up against philosophy, not limited to a mere social
protest, but carried out into political injustice. The antagonism
between learning and Polytheism was becoming every day more distinct. Of
the philosophers, some were obliged to flee into exile, some suffered
death. The natural result of such a state of things was to force them to
practise concealment and mystification, as is strikingly shown in the
history of the Pythagoreans.

[Sidenote: Pythagoras, biography of.]

Of Pythagoras, the founder of this sect, but little is known with
certainty; even the date of his birth is contested, probably he was born
at Samos about B.C. 540. If we were not expressly told so, we should
recognize from his doctrines that he had been in Egypt and India. Some
eminent scholars, who desire on all occasions to magnify the learning of
ancient Europe, depreciate as far as they can the universal test