Page:The Golden verses of Pythagoras (IA cu31924026681076).pdf/165

 bodies." The founder of the Lyceum, in giving such a definition of friendship, spoke rather by theory than by practice, he who reasoning one day upon friendship, cried ingenuously: "Oh, my friends! there are no friends."

Yet Pythagoras did not conceive friendship as a simple individual affection, but as an universal benevolence which should be extended to all men in general, and to all good people. At that time he gave to this virtue the name of philanthropy. It is the virtue which, under the name of charity, serves as foundation for the Christian religion. Jesus offers it to his disciples immediately after divine love, and as equal to piety. Zoroaster places it after sincerityə; he wished that man might be pure in thought, speech, and action; that he might speak the truth, and that he might do good to all men. Kong-Tse as well as Pythagoras commended it after filial piety. "All morals," he said, "can be reduced to the observation of three fundamental laws, of the relations between sovereigns and subjects, between parents and children, between husbands and wives; and to the strict practice of the five capital virtues, of which the first is humanity, that is to say, that universal charity, that expansion of the soul which binds man to man without distinction."

Here is the proof of what I said just now, that Pythagoras recognized two motives of human actions, the first, issuing from a constrained nature, called Necessity; the second emanating from a free nature, called Power, and both dependent upon an implied primordial law. This doctrine