Note 37 — BOOK I[1] THE PHILOSOPHERS

I cannot trace Hippolytus’ authority for attributing these neo-Pythagorean puerilities to Pythagoras himself. Diog. Laert., Aristotle and the rest represent him as saying only that the monad was the beginning of everything, and that from this and the undefined dyad numbers proceed. The general reader may be recommended to Mr. Alfred Williams Benn’s statement in The Philosophy of Greece (Lond., 1898), pp. 78 ff. that “the Greeks did not think of numbers as pure abstractions, but in the most literal sense as figures, that is to say, limited portions of space.”