The Sleepwalkers Read Online Free

sun and the stars have neither substance nor permanence, they are merely cloudy exhalations of the earth which have caught fire. The stars are burnt out at dawn, and in the evening a new set of stars is formed from new exhalations. Similarly, a new sun is born every morning from the crowding together of sparks. The moon is a compressed, luminous cloud, which dissolves in a month; then a new cloud starts forming. Over different regions of the earth, there are different suns and moons, all cloudy illusions.
    In this manner do the earliest rational theories of the Universe betray the bias and temperament of their makers. It is generally believed that with the progress of scientific method, the theories became more objective and reliable. Whether this belief is justified, we shall see. But à propos of Xenophanes we may note that two thousand years later Galileo also insisted on regarding comets as atmospheric illusions – for purely personal reasons, and against the evidence of his telescope.
    Neither the cosmology of Anaxagoras, nor of Xenophanes, gained a considerable following. Every philosopher of the period seems to have had his own theory regarding the nature of the universe around him. To quote Professor Burnet, "no sooner did an Ionian philosopher learn half a dozen geometrical propositions and hear that the phenomena of the heavens recur in cycles than he set to work to look for law everywhere in nature and with an audacity amounting to hybris to construct a system of the universe." 6 But their diverse speculations had this one feature in common, that the sun-eating serpents and Olympian stringpullers were discarded; each theory, however strange and bizarre, was concerned with natural causes.
    The sixth century scene evokes the image of an orchestra expectantly tuning up, each player absorbed in his own instrument only, deaf to the caterwaulings of the others. Then there is a dramatic silence, the conductor enters the stage, raps three times with his baton, and harmony emerges from the chaos. The maestro is Pythagoras of Samos, whose influence on the ideas, and thereby on the destiny, of the human race was probably greater than that of any single man before or after him.

    IITHE HARMONY OF THE SPHERES

    1.
Pythagoras of Samos
    PYTHAGORAS
was born in the early decades of that tremendous century of
awakening, the sixth; and may have seen it go out, for he lived at
least eighty, and possibly over ninety, years. Into that long
life-span he packed, in the words of Empedokles, "all things
that are contained in ten, even in twenty, generations of men".
    It is impossible to decide whether a particular detail of the Pythagorean universe was the work of the master, or filled in by a pupil – a remark which equally applies to Leonardo or Michelangelo. But there can be no doubt that the basic features were conceived by a single mind; that Pythagoras of Samos was both the founder of a new religious philosophy, and the founder of Science, as the word is understood today.
    It seems reasonably certain that he was the son of a silversmith and gem engraver named Mnesarchos; that he was a pupil of Anaximander, the atheist, but also of Pherekydes, the mystic who taught the transmigration of souls. He must have travelled extensively in Asia Minor and Egypt, as many educated citizens of the Greek Islands did; and it is said that he was charged with diplomatic missions by Polycrates, the enterprising autocrat of Samos. Polycrates was an enlightened tyrant who favoured commerce, piracy, engineering, and the fine arts; the greatest poet of the time, Anakreon, and the greatest engineer, Eupalinos from Megara, both lived at his court. According to a story by Herodotus, he became so powerful that, to placate the jealousy of the gods, he threw his most precious signet ring into the deep waters. A few days later, his cook cut open a large fish, freshly caught, and found the ring in its stomach. The doomed Polycrates promptly walked into a trap set