For our purpose their absurdity is their chief merit. They are not stories which any Greek mathematician could possibly have invented, but popular tales bearing witness to the existence of a real tradition that Pythagoras was the author of this momentous discovery. On the other hand, the statement that he discovered the "consonances" by measuring the lengths corresponding to them on the monochord is quite credible and involves no error in acoustics.
52.Things are numbers. It was this, no doubt, that led Pythagoras to say all things were numbers. We shall see that, at a later date, the Pythagoreans identified these numbers with geometrical figures; but the mere fact that they called them "numbers," taken in connexion with what we are told about the method of Eurytos, is sufficient to show this was not the original sense of the doctrine. It is enough to suppose that Pythagoras reasoned somewhat as follows. If musical sounds can be reduced to numbers, why not everything else? There are many likenesses to number in things, and it may well be that a lucky experiment, like that by which the octave was discovered, will reveal their true numerical nature. The Neopythagorean writers, going back in this as in other matters to the earliest tradition of the school, indulge their fancy in tracing out analogies between things and numbers in endless variety; but we are fortunately dispensed from following them in these vagaries. Aristotle tells us distinctly that the Pythagoreans explained only a few things by means of numbers,[1] which means that Pythagoras himself left no developed doctrine on the subject, while the Pythagoreans of the fifth century did not care to add anything of the sort to the tradition. Aristotle does imply, however, that according to them the "right time" (καιρός)
- ↑ Arist. Met. M, 4. 1078 b 21 (R. P. 78). The Theologumena Arithmetica is full of such fancies (R. P. 78 a). Alexander, in Met. p. 38, 8, gives a few definitions which may be old (R. P. 78 c).
that, if they did, the weights hung to equal strings would produce the notes. The number of vibrations really varies with the square root of the weights. These inaccuracies were pointed out by Montucla (Martin, Études sur le Timée, i. p. 391).
