from which everything came into being and of which all is ultimately made is water.
Other Ionian philosophers came to different conclusions about the primordial
substance, but their common enquiry was into the nature of the physical universe on
the assumption that it is both one and intelligible.
Pythagoras in the second half of the sixth century marks a reaction against the
materialism of the early Ionians. He migrated from Samos in Ionia to southern Italy
where he founded a community for initiates on religious lines. Associated with
Pythagoras is the doctrine of the soul’s immortality and its reincarnation in a cycle of
lives in the animal and human spheres (metempsychosis). The body is regarded as
the prison or tomb of the soul, which may be purified in an ascetic life of study. He
explained the universe not in physical but in metaphysical terms, tracing the origin
of all things to number. He is accredited with developments in mathematics and
music, in particular with the doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, which in their
motion were supposed to make heavenly music. With Pythagoras the word kosmos,
which means good order or decency in early Greek, is first used to describe the
perfect order and arrangement of the universe.
Heraclitus of Ephesus of the late sixth and early fifth centuries expressed the
belief that fire is the primordial substance. The world is an everlasting fire, which is
partly flaring up and partly dying down in equal measure so that a continuous balance
is maintained. Essential to this balance are tension and strife in which all subsists.
Unlike other Ionian materialists, he associated this primordial element with the Logos.
This universal reason, the principle whereby there is unity in diversity and diversity
in unity, is divine and all-wise and is to be identified with what is eternal and constant,
the One, while the phenomenal world is constantly changingand in a state of flux.
Parmenides of the Eleatic school (Elea was a Greek colony in southern Italy) in
the fifth century believed that Being, the One, is real, while Becoming, change, is
illusion. The universe is single and unchanging. He distinguished two ways of appre-
hending the world. There is the way of truth in which there is knowledge of Being,
which, for Parmenides, is material, and the way of opinion (the common condition of
ordinary men and women) that takes the world of Becoming as real. The mutable
world of appearances that we apprehend through the senses is unreal; Being is the
only true object of knowledge and is known through reason and thought.
The Sicilian Empedocles (c. 492–432) denied the belief of the Eleatic school that
the universe is single and unchanging. He believed that the four elements of which
everything was made, earth, water, fire and air, are constantly subject to change under
the influence alternatively of the governing forces of Love and Strife, the latter being
dominant in his own times.
These and other early philosophers are collectively known as the Pre-Socratics,
because, with Socrates philosophy takes a new direction. The Roman writer Cicero
(106–143) made the famous remark that Socrates first brought philosophy down from
188 THE GREEKS