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Pythagoras: Souls
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Pythagoras developed the theory that animals are generated one from another by means of sperm, since sperm according to him is a drop of brain matter which contains hot steam. His doctrine of the transmigration of souls had its beginning in an attempt to find the perfection of human society; it is really the doctrine of the immortality of the soul mixed up with various speculations. Pythagoras's contemporaries did not accept these theories, and he was much ridiculed and frequently suffered persecution.
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Pythagoras was not an extremist. He taught moderation in all things rather than excess in anything, for he believed that an excess of virtue was in itself a vice. One of his favorite statements was: "We must avoid with our utmost endeavor, and amputate with fire and sword, and by all other means, from the body, sickness; from the soul, ignorance; from the belly, luxury; from a city, sedition; from a family, discord; and from all things, excess." Pythagoras ... believed that there was no crime equal to that of anarchy.
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“Pythagoras believed in metempsychosis and thought that eating meat was an abominable thing, saying that the souls of all animals enter different animals after death. He himself used to say that he remembered being, in Trojan times, Euphorbus, Panthus’ son who was killed by Menelaus. They say that once when he was staying at Argos he saw a shield from the spoils of Troy nailed up, and burst into tears. When the Argives asked him the reason for his emotion, he said that he himself had borne that shield at Troy when he was Euphorbus.
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Pythagoras taught that friendship was the truest and nearest perfect of all relationships. He declared that in Nature there was a friendship of all for all; of gods for men; of doctrines one for another; of the soul for the body; of the rational part for the irrational part; of philosophy for its theory; of men for one another; of countrymen for one another; that friendship ... existed between strangers, between a man and his wife, his children, and his servants. All bonds without friendship were shackles, and there was no virtue in their maintenance. Pythagoras believed that relationships were essentially mental rather than physical, and that a stranger of sympathetic intellect was closer to him than a blood relation whose viewpoint was at variance with his own. Pythagoras defined knowledge as the fruitage of mental accumulation. He believed that it would be obtained in many ways, but principally through observation.
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Part of Pythagoras' teaching was religious and mystical, and it was presumably this aspect which led his contemporary Heracleitus to regard him as a fraud. Another contemporary, XenophanÄ“s, mocked the most celebrated aspect of his teaching, his doctrine of reincarnation or the transmigration of souls (metempsychÅsis), with the story that Pythagoras once claimed to recognize a friend's voice in the howling of a puppy which was being beaten. Pythagoras ... declared that he remembered his own previous incarnations, including that as the Trojan Euphorbus, killed in the siege. Pythagoras taught that the soul (a combination of life-principle, self, and mind) is immortal, a fallen divinity imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. Since the soul is rational and responsible for its actions, the choices it makes determine the kind of body into which it is reincarnated, human or animal (perhaps even plant; EmpedoclÄ“s, who was greatly influenced by Pythagorean ideas, declares that in one of his incarnations he was a bush). By keeping itself pure from the pollutions of the body the soul may eventually win release from it (see also ORPHEUS and compare Orphic beliefs, with which Pythagoras obviously had much in common).
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Pythagoras' cosmos was developed in a more scientific and mathematical direction by his successors in the Pythagorean tradition, Philolaus and Archytas. Pythagoras succeeded in promulgating a new more optimistic view of the fate of the soul after death and in founding a way of life that was attractive for its rigor and discipline and that drew to him numerous devoted followers.
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