Initiation into Philosophy | Page 3

elements, for whereas the philosophers who preceded him gave
as the sole source of things--some water, others air, others fire, others
the earth, he regarded them all four equally as the primal elements of
everything. He believed that the world is swayed by two contrary
forces--love and hate, the one desiring eternally to unite, the other
eternally to disintegrate. Amid this struggle goes on a movement of
organization, incessantly retarded by hate, perpetually facilitated by
love; and from this movement have issued--first, vegetation, then the

lower animals, then the higher animals, then men. In Empedocles can
be found either evident traces of the religion of Zoroaster of Persia (the
perpetual antagonism of two great gods, that of good and that of evil),
or else a curious coincidence with this doctrine, which will appear
again later among the Manicheans.
PYTHAGORAS.--Pythagoras appears to have been born about B.C.
500 on the Isle of Elea, to have travelled much, and to have finally
settled in Greater Greece (southern Italy). Pythagoras, like Empedocles,
was a sort of magician or god. His doctrine was a religion, the respect
with which he was surrounded was a cult, the observances he imposed
on his family and on his disciples were rites. What he taught was that
the true realities, which do not change, were numbers. The fundamental
and supreme reality is _one_; the being who is one is God; from this
number, which is one, are derived all the other numbers which are the
foundation of beings, their inward cause, their essence; we are all more
or less perfect numbers; each created thing is a more or less perfect
number. The world, governed thus by combinations of numbers, has
always existed and will always exist. It develops itself, however,
according to a numerical series of which we do not possess the key, but
which we can guess. As for human destiny it is this: we have been
animated beings, human or animal; according as we have lived well or
ill we shall be reincarnated either as superior men or as animals more or
less inferior. This is the doctrine of metempsychosis, which had many
adherents in ancient days, and also in a more or less fanciful fashion in
modern times.
To Pythagoras have been attributed a certain number of maxims which
are called the Golden Verses.
XENOPHANES; PARMENIDES.--Xenophanes of Colophon is also a
"unitarian." He accepts only one God, and of all the ancient
philosophers appears to be the most opposed to mythology, to belief in
a multiplicity of gods resembling men, a doctrine which he despises as
being immoral. There is one God, eternal, immutable, immovable, who
has no need to transfer Himself from one locality to another, who is
without place, and who governs all things by His thought alone.

Advancing further, Parmenides told himself that if He alone really
exists who is one and eternal and unchangeable, all else is not only
inferior to Him, but is only a semblance, and that mankind, earth, sky,
plants, and animals are only a vast illusion--phantoms, a mirage, which
would disappear, which would no longer exist, and would never have
existed if we could perceive the Self-existent.
ZENO; DEMOCRITUS.--Zeno of Elea, who must be mentioned more
especially because he was the master of that Gorgias of whom Socrates
was the adversary, was pre-eminently a subtle dialectician in whom the
sophist already made his appearance, and who embarrassed the
Athenians by captious arguments, at the bottom of which always could
be found this fundamental principle: apart from the Eternal Being all is
only semblance; apart from Him who is all, all is nothing.
Democritus of Abdera, disciple of Leucippus of Abdera (about whom
nothing is known), is the inventor of the theory of atoms. Matter is
composed of an infinite number of tiny indivisible bodies which are
called atoms; these atoms from all eternity, or at least since the
commencement of matter, have been endued with certain movements
by which they attach themselves to one another, and agglomerate or
separate, and thence is caused the formation of all things, and the
destruction, which is only the disintegration, of all things. The soul
itself is only an aggregation of specially tenuous and subtle atoms. It is
probable that when a certain number of these atoms quit the body, sleep
ensues; that when nearly all depart, it causes the appearance of death
(lethargy, catalepsy); that when they all depart, death occurs. We are
brought into relation with the external world by the advent in us of
extremely subtle atoms--reflections of things, semblances of
things--which enter and mingle with the constituent atoms of our souls.
There is nothing in our intelligence which has not been brought there
by our senses, and our intelligence is only the combination of the atoms
composing our souls