thing and refining effects, but for the intellectual interest of its
numerical relations. Reference has already been made (see above, p.
27) to their quaint doctrine of the music of the spheres; and the same
idea of rhythmic harmony pervaded the whole system. The life of the
soul was a harmony; the virtues were perfect numbers; and the influence
of music on the soul was only one instance among many of the harmonious
relations of things throughout the universe. Thus we have Pythagoras
described as soothing mental afflictions, and bodily ones also, by
rhythmic measure and by song. With the morning's dawn he would be
astir, harmonising his own spirit to his lyre, and chanting ancient
hymns of the Cretan Thales, of Homer, and of Hesiod, till all the
tremors of his soul were calmed and still.

Night and morning also he prescribed for himself and his followers an
examination, as it were a _tuning_ and testing of oneself. At these
times especially was it meet for us to take account of our soul and its
doings; in the evening to ask, "Wherein have I transgressed? What
done? What failed to do?" In the morning, "What must I do? Wherein
repair past days' forgetfulness?"

But the first duty of all was truth,--truth to one's own highest, truth
to the highest beyond us. Through truth alone could the soul approach
the divine. {30} Falsehood was of the earth; the real life of the soul
must be in harmony with the heavenly and eternal verities.

Pythagoreanism remained a power for centuries throughout the Greek
world and beyond. All subsequent philosophies borrowed from it, as it
in its later developments borrowed from them; and thus along with them
it formed the mind of the world, for further apprehensions, and yet
more authentic revelations, of divine order and moral excellence.

{31}

CHAPTER IV

THE ELEATICS

_God and nature--Knowledge and opinion--Being and evolution--Love the
creator--The modern egotism_

[79]

I. XENOPHANES.--Xenophanes was a native of Colophon, one of the Ionian
cities of Asia Minor, but having been forced at the age of twenty-five
to leave his native city owing to some political revolution, he
wandered to various cities of Greece, and ultimately to Zancle and
Catana, Ionian colonies in Sicily, and thence to Elea or Velia, a Greek
city on the coast of Italy. This city had, like Miletus, reached a
high pitch of commercial prosperity, and like it also became a centre
of philosophic t