"Pythagorean science... will inevitably reproduce the later and inconsistent conception of the atomic, indestructible, individual soul. This... was... present in Orphic religion, fallen from its first Dionysiac faith in the one continuous life in all things, towards the Olympian conception of athanasia. The later Pythagoreans of the fifth century 'construct the whole world out of numbers, but they suppose the units to have magnitude. As to how the first unit with magnitude arose, they appear to be at a loss.' ...at a loss, because they could not realise that this physical doctrine was ...a reflection of the belief in a plurality of immortal souls, which contradicted their older faith that Soul was a Harmony—a bond linking all things in one. This Soul had formerly been the One God manifest in the logos; now it is broken up into a multitude of individual atoms, each claiming an immortal and separate persistence. And the material world suffers a corresponding change. In place of the doctrine of procession from the Monad, bodies are built up out of numbers, now conceived as collections of ultimate units, having position and magnitude. Thus, Pythagoreanism is led... from a temporal monism to a spatial pluralism—a doctrine of number-atoms hardly distinguishable from the atoms of Leukippus and Democritus, who, as Aristotle says, like these Pythagoreans, 'in a sense make all things to be numbers and to consist of numbers.' But the development of this number-atomism was predestined by religious representations of the nature of soul older than Pythagoreanism itself, and already contained in the blend of Dionysiac and Olympian conceptions inherited by Pythagoras from Orphism."
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pp. 212-213. Footnote on 5thC quote: Aristotole, Metaphysics 16, 10800 18 ff. See Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 336 ff.
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