Pythagoras took the next important step by subordinating the mere matter of nature to its essential principle of form and order, identifying the latter with reason or the soul.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'
Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.
From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.
Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.
It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.
Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.
The Pythagoreans degrade impious men into brutes and, if one is to believe Empedocles, even into plants.