eason Pythagoras started
his school in Italy; his hatred of the tyranny of Polycrates enforced
him to abandon his native country Samos.

Heraclitus and Hippasus of Metapontum suppose that fire gives the
origination to all beings, that they all flow from fire, and in fire
they all conclude; for of fire when first quenched the world was
constituted. The first part of the world, being most condensed and
contracted within itself, made the earth; but part of that earth being
loosened and made thin by fire, water was produced; afterwards this
water being exhaled and rarefied into vapors became air; after all this
the world itself, and all other corporeal beings, shall be dissolved by
fire in the universal conflagration. By them therefore it appears that
fire is what gives beginning to all things, and is that in which all
things receive their period.

Epicurus the son of Neocles, the Athenian, his philosophical sentiments
being the same with those of Democritus, affirms that the principles of
all being are bodies which are only perceptible by reason; they admit
not of a vacuity, nor of any original, but being of a self-existence are
eternal and incorruptible; they are not liable to any diminution,
they are indestructible, nor is it possible for them to receive any
transformation of parts, or admit of any alterations; of these reason is
only the discoverer; they are in a perpetual motion in vacuity, and by
means of the empty space; for the vacuum itself is infinite, and the
bodies that move in it are infinite. Those bodies acknowledge these
three accidents, figure, magnitude, and gravity. Democritus acknowledged
but two, magnitude and figure. Epicurus added the third, to wit,
gravity; for he pronounced that it is necessary that bodies receive
their motion from that impression which springs from gravity,
otherwise they could not be moved. The figures of atoms cannot be
incomprehensible, but they are not infinite. These figures are neither
hooked nor trident-shaped nor ring-shaped, such figures as these being
exposed to collision; but the atoms are impassible, impenetrable; they
have indeed figures of their own, which are conceived only by reason.
It is called an atom, by reason not of its smallness but of its
indivisibility; in it no vacuity, no passible affection is to be found.
And that there is an atom is perfectly clear; for there are elements
which have a perpetual duration, and there are animals which admit of a
vacuity,