"To this society men and women were admitted without distinction; they had all possessions in common, and a 'common fellowship and mode of life.' ...[N]o individual... was allowed to claim the credit of any discovery... It was vulgarly supposed that the school must have wished to keep its knowledge to itself as a 'mysterious' doctrine, as if there were any conceivable reason for hiding a theorem in geometry or harmonics. ...What is to be gathered from the story of Hippasos is that the pious Pythagoreans believed that the Master’s spirit dwelt continually within his church, and was the source of all its inspiration. ...The impiety lay, not in divulging a discovery in mathematics, but in claiming to have invented what could only have come from... a group-soul... living on after [Pythagoras'] death as the Logos of his disciples."
Pythagoreanism

January 1, 1970

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Original Language: English

Sources

pp. 202-203.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism