ABSTRACT
Philosophers with a very natural impulse to magnify their own cult have tended to claim for it a divine or at least heroic ancestry. "Philosophy", said Plato, "was the child of wonder"; and around this birth there has come to cluster something of the mystery and the glamor of a divine incarnation and a miraculous parthenogenesis. The Pythagoreans first developed the parallelism, afterwards to be taken up and elaborated by Plato, among the cosmos, the state, and the individual. In each there is the same conflict between chaos and anarchy on the one side, and the ordering, ruling, limiting, harmonizing principle, on the other. The problem of oppositions and their reconciliation was, in a certain sense, one important dividing line in philosophy. To the consideration of Greek philosophy as a total development the authors may regard these two themes as complementary—point and counterpoint.
