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They are part of the same longing for wisdom which we call philosophy .
    Together, these claims constitute a potent attack on our schools and our politics. Good and evil exist. Truth exists, and we can come to know it. The beautiful exists, and we are meant to love it. For the world cannot be reduced to matter alone.
     
    The first Greeks to call themselves philosophers strove to understand the physical world, to see what prime element underlay clouds and lions and marble and blood. We should not take for granted their bold assumption that such an element could be found, and that the world was intelligible! Thales of Miletus 14 reasoned that such an element must be capable of assuming the three phases of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Hence he posited that water was somehow the arche or foundation or origin of all things, though he knew well that you couldn’t squeeze water to make iron or clay. His successor Anaximenes voted for air. Others named earth or fire or some combination of the four so-called elements.
     
    But there’s a logical problem with all explanations of the world that resolve it into such stuff as water or air. 15 To say that the arche of the world is water doesn’t explain anything, since water is itself one of the things that requires explaining. It is circular reasoning. Nor does it help to stretch the circle as wide as the cosmos. The philosopher Anaximander, therefore, reasoned that whatever the arche is, it cannot be like the things it explains. It must be beyond predication. So he called it the ape-iron or the boundless. 16
     
    Historians of science now mutter. “If only the Greeks had remained on the materialist track! They might have made fantastic discoveries in chemistry and physics. But instead we lose ourselves in metaphysical speculation and theology.” They too might have had plastic cities and hearts, centuries before our time.
     
    Yes, the Greeks might have made impressive discoveries. Thales noticed that certain signs always preceded a bumper crop of olives. So one year he bought up every oil-press he could find, and made a killing. 17 But let’s pardon the Greeks for assuming that the world, and man, present more important and interesting questions than can a vat of olives. Anaximander’s objection demands to be answered. If there is a cause of the world, it cannot be one of the objects in the world—that collection of things no one of which is the cause of itself. Then it must be radically different from those objects. Then it cannot be material.
     
    That observation seems self-evident, but today it would be derided as “unscientific.” “We can have no knowledge of things unless they are material,” says the modern professor. Is that so? Pythagoras, for instance, discovered that strings whose lengths were of certain ratios would sound notes of a certain harmony: a string half as long as another, of the same girth and stretched to the same tension, would sound a note exactly one octave higher, the so-called diapason. He saw such harmonies in all the world, and concluded, with the soul of a mathematical physicist, that all the world was made of immaterial number . When we recall that Pythagoras had no numerical system to work with, and that for him and his fellow Greeks the sentence 3 x 2 = 6 meant that “a rectangle made by segments three units long and two units wide will have an area of six square units,” we sense that for him “number” meant ratio , exact relationship. We might say, more poetically, that the world is made of harmonic law. Such was the awe with which Pythagoras contemplated this truth, that he attracted a group of devoted followers, who joined him in religious devotions inspired by the laws of numbers. They revered him as a saint. 18
     
    It’s easy to laugh at their innocence, but Pythagoras has rolled an engine of war into the camp to stand alongside Anaximander. What is the status of such mathematical objects as a triangle? The Greeks were too