mathematics, medicine, ethics and the science of
government.

The Pythagorean plan of treating the sick by music was long considered
as mere incantation, but there is a suspicion now that it was actual
science. Once there was a man who rode a hobby all his life; and long
after he was dead, folks discovered it was a real live horse and had
carried the man long miles.

Pythagoras reduced the musical scale to a mathematical science. In
astronomy he anticipated Copernicus, and indeed, it was cited as the
chief offense of Copernicus that he had borrowed from a pagan.
Copernicus, it seems, set the merry churchmen digging into Greek
literature to find out just how bad Pythagoras was. This did the
churchmen good, but did not help the cause of Copernicus.

Pythagoras for a time sought to popularize his work, but he soon found
to his dismay that he was attracting cheap and unworthy people, who came
not so much out of a love of learning as to satisfy a morbid curiosity
and gain a short cut to wisdom. They wanted secrets, and knowing that
Pythagoras had spent twenty years in Egypt, they came to him, hoping to
get them.

Said Pythagoras, "He who digs, always finds." At another time, he put
the same idea reversely, thus, "He who digs not, never finds."

Pythagoras was well past forty when he married a daughter of one of the
chief citizens of Crotona. It seems that, inspired by his wife, who was
first one of his pupils and then a disciple, he conceived a new mode of
life, which he thought would soon overthrow the old manner of living.

Pythagoras himself wrote nothing, but all his pupils kept tablets, and
Athens in the century following Pythagoras was full of these Pythagorean
notebooks, and these supply us the scattered data from which his life
was written.

Pythagoras, like so many other great men, had his dream of Utopia: it
was a college or, literally, "a collection of people," where all were on
an equality. Everybody worked, everybody studied, everybody helped
everybody, and all refrained from disturbing or distressing any one. It
was the Oneida Community taken over by Brook Farm and fused into a
religious and scientific New Harmony by the Shakers.

One smiles to see the minute rules that were made for the guidance of
the members. They look like a transcript from a sermon by John Alexander
Dowie, revised by the shade of Robert Owen.

This Pythagorean Community was organized out of a necessity in order to
escape the bl