|
Limited— Good |
Unlimited— Bad
|
Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres—
"The Pythagorean philosophy, like Zoroastrianism, Taoism, and every early system of higher thought, is based upon the concept of dualism. Pythagoras constructed a table of opposites from which he was able to derive every concept needed for a philosophy of the phenomenal world. As reconstructed by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, the table contains ten dualities (ten being a particularly important number in the Pythagorean system, as we shall see):
| Limited Odd One Right Male Rest Straight Light Good Square |
Unlimited Even Many Left Female Motion Curved Dark Bad Oblong |
Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited (man, finite time, and so forth) and the unlimited (the cosmos, eternity, etc.) is not only the aim of Pythagoras's system but the central aim of all Western philosophy."