Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/450

 428 HISTORY OF GREECE comprehensive end ; l to treat each of the great and familiar words designating moral attributes, as logical aggregates compre- hending many judgments in particular cases, and connoting a certain harmony or consistency of purpose among the separate judgments, to bring many of these latter into comparison, by a scrutinizing dialectical process, so as to test the consistency and completeness of the logical aggregate or general notion, as it stood in every man's mind: all these were parts of the same forward movement which Sokrates originated. It was at that time a great progress to break down the unwieldy mass conceived by former philosophers as science ; and to study ethics apart, with a reference, more or less distinct, to their own appropriate end. Nay, we see, if we may trust the " Phsedon " of Plato, 2 that Sokrates, before he resolved on such pronounced severance, had tried to construct, or had at least yearned after, an undivided and reformed system, including physics also under the ethical end ; a scheme of optimistic physics, applying the general idea, " What was best" as the commanding principle, from whence physical explanations were Aristotle thinks that the Pythagoreans had some faint and obscure notion of the logical genus, irepl rov r i e a T i v f/pgavro psv XsyEiv KOI 6pi&a$at, hiav 6s (invlcjf eirpayfiaTEvdijaav (Metaphys. i, 5, 29, p. 986, B). But we see by comparing two other passages in that treatise (xiii, 4, 6, p. 1078, b, with i, 5, 2, p. 985, b) that the Pythagorean definitions of Kaipbf, TO d'ucaiov, etc., were nothing more than certain numerical fancies; so that these words cannot fairly be said to have designated, in their view, logical genera. Nor can the ten Pythagorean avaroixiat, or parallel series of contraries, be called by that name ; arranged in order to gratify a fancy about the perfection of the number ten, which fancy afterwards seems to have passed to Aristotle himself, when drawing up his ten predicaments. See a valuable Excursus upon the Aristotelian expressions ri eort rl TJV elvai, etc., appended to Schwegler's edition of Aristotle's Metaphysica vol. ii, p. 369, p. 378. About the few and imperfect definitions which Aristotle seems also to ascribe to Demokritus, see Trendeleuburg, Comment, ad Aristot. De Ani- ma, p. 212. 1 Aristotle remarks about the Pythagoreans, that they referred the virtues to number and numerical relations, not giving to them a theory of their own : ruf yap uperuf cif roi)f upi-&/j.oi>f avdyuv ov K o I K E i av TUV up ruv TTJV &eupiav kiroulro (Ethic. Magn. i, 1 ).
 * Plato, Phsedon, c. 102, seq., pp. 96, 97.