such a reply one must be the wife of Pythagoras, and love him as
Theano did. And they would be in the right, for it is not marriage
that sanctifies love, it is love which justifies marriage."[1]


[1] EDOUARD SCHURE: _Pythagoras and the Delphic Mysteries_, trans.
by F. ROTHWELL, B.A. (1906), pp. 164 and 165.


PYTHAGORAS was not merely a mathematician. he was first and foremost
a philosopher, whose philosophy found in number the basis of all things,
because number, for him, alone possessed stability of relationship.
As I have remarked on a former occasion, "The theory that the Cosmos
has its origin and explanation in Number . . . is one for which it
is not difficult to account if we take into consideration the nature
of the times in which it was formulated. The Greek of the period,
looking upon Nature, beheld no picture of harmony, uniformity and
fundamental unity. The outer world appeared to him rather
as a discordant chaos, the mere sport and plaything of the gods.
The theory of the uniformity of Nature--that Nature is ever
like to herself--the very essence of the modern scientific spirit,
had yet to be born of years of unwearied labour and unceasing
delving into Nature's innermost secrets. Only in Mathematics--in
the properties of geometrical figures, and of numbers--was the reign
of law, the principle of harmony, perceivable. Even at this present
day when the marvellous has become commonplace, that property of
right-angled triangles . . . already discussed . . . comes to the mind
as a remarkable and notable fact: it must have seemed a stupendous
marvel to its discoverer, to whom, it appears, the regular alternation
of the odd and even numbers, a fact so obvious to us that we are