Читать книгу A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy онлайн

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The Philosophy of the Atomists—Leucippus and the School at Abdera.

The Later Pythagoreans.

The Pythagoreans, be it remarked, were “Reconcilers,” but they were more. The original ethical motive of Pythagoras influenced them as scientists. They did not attempt to formulate a science of ethics, but the ethical motive was always back of their mathematics and astronomy.

1. The Pythagorean Conception of Being.

The important position in the evolution of Greek thought occupied by the Pythagoreans depends upon their conception of that Being that abides amid all change. Pythagoreanism is usually spoken of as “the number theory.” This is, however, only a suggestion of its import. For numbers are not to the Pythagoreans what the different kinds of cosmic matter were to the early monists, or what the several elements were to the pluralists,—Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the atomists. Neither are they abstractions merely, such as we use in scientific reckoning. The Pythagoreans were pluralists and hylozoists whose plural numbers look beyond hylozoism.