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 436 PHILOSOPHY at least in its original form, is that of Lao-tse. It starts with the Tao, or unnamable, the ori- gin of heaven and earth, "the mother of all things." It is universally present, invisible, inexhaustible, before the gods, without desires, and into it all beings return. With this attempt to grasp the ideal absolute are associated other paradoxes, as: everything proceeds from its opposite, being is the source of non-being, to- gether with other apophthegms, that remind us of Plato's "Phaxlo" or the speculations of Hegel. Among the Perso-Median races, philo- sophical speculation is closely connected with religious belief. Its germs are found in the fundamental doctrines of the sacred writings, the Zend-Avesta, ascribed to Zoroaster, but of uncertain though very ancient date. The world, in which evil is in perpetual conflict with good, is the great problem to be solved. The evil cannot come from the good deity, Ahura Maz- da (Ormuzd), and hence an evil principle, tem- porarily of approximately equal power, must exist by whom the good is opposed and the evil introduced and favored. This evil deity, Ahriman, serves to explain the problem of the origin of evil, and emphasize the moral as well as the physical antagonisms of creation. The conflicting elements of present existence throw their shadow over the future, where the re- ward is as blissful as the retribution is bitter. It is not strange that long after Zoroaster, and in the 3d century of the Christian era, his main doctrines should have been adopted by Mani as the basis of the sect which he founded. Egyptian philosophy, whatever it may have been, has left few traces of the speculative ele- ment. We must seek " the wisdom of Egypt" in theosophy and ethics. The first eight Egyp- tian gods seem to represent a process of divine development or emanation. They constitute something like a transition from the absolute spiritualism of India to the religion of nature and humanity of the western nations. There is some ground for regarding Egyptian my- thology as a compound of which the elements were contributed by a native and an invading race. Ammon, the chief god of Upper Egypt, is the head of a cosmogony which proceeds from spirit down to matter ; while Ptah, the chief god of Lower Egypt, is at the beginning of a cosmogony which ascends by a process of evolution from matter up to spirit. Ptah is heat, and from this proceeds light ; from light, life ; and from life, gods, men, plants, animals all organic existence. Of the third order of the gods, the circle of Isis and Osiris, Herodo- tus says, "They are the only gods worshipped throughout Egypt." They are supposed to represent the original religious belief of the native element of the population, and as such symbolize the forms and forces of outward nature. In the time of Plutarch this symbol- ism was^a profound study, and was not with- out its influence on the development of the Alexandrian school. It was closely connected with the Egyptian view of the moral order of the world, the immortality and transmigration of the soul, and retribution after death. The Osiris worship was elevated by the priests to a moral significance, and made an allegory of the struggles, sorrows, and self -recovery of the human spirit. It was connected moreover with a severe practical morality. This morality is set forth in a papyrus supposed to be nearly 4,000 years old, and written by one who calls himself the son of a king. Its practical phi- losophy is not unlike that of the Proverbs of Solomon. It glorifies wisdom, represents the bad man's life as a living death, and enforces its precepts by the consideration of the divine presence even with the solitary soul. Hither- to philosophy had been in close alliance with mythology. In Greece that alliance, after giv- ing an impulse and direction to speculation, was weakened or dissolved. Pre-Socratic phi- losophy had for its special problem an expla- nation of nature, independent of the poetic cosmogonies. Under the manifold phenomena of the physical universe it sought the first prin- ciple, the primitive ground of things. Of the physicists of the Ionic school, Thales (about 640-546 B. C.), Anaximander (differently class- ed by Lewes), and Anaximenes are the most noted. Thales, however, advanced formally but little beyond the Homeric cosmogony, which ascribed to Oceanus and Tethys the ori- gin of all things, when he represented the be- ginning of things to be water. His explana- tion simply eliminated the mythical element. Anaximander of Miletus, sometimes spoken of as his disciple and sometimes as his contem- porary, substituted for water (as apxfy or be- ginning of things) rb aireipov, the unlimited, to which it is difficult to attach a definite sig- nificance, but which may be supposed to be a kind of primitive substance, with latent, com- mingled, but undeveloped forces. Anaximenes, who accepted this "unlimited," but made it the all-embracing, all-moving air, scarcely passed beyond the line of his predecessors, who lim- ited themselves to the theory of a primitive substance out of which the universe was devel- oped. Pythagoras of Samos (flourished 540- 500 B. 0.), founder of the school that bears his name, regarded the universe in its quanti- tative rather than its qualitative relations. He asked after the form and order, rather than the substance of things. The secret of his philosophy was in number, and in the One he found that which was most perfect. Pro- ceeding from the One, identified with God, he found the universe a scheme of numerical pro- portions and harmonies, in his own language a Icosmos. By numbers the quantitative rela- tions of things are determined. Forms and proportion may be resolved into number. Much that Pythagoras taught is left obscure, and some things doubtless are credited to him which belong to his disciples. His phi- losophy, in its ethical and religious aspects, shows a marked advance. His contrast of the paths and results of virtue and vice has be-