Therefore, while expressing himself
neither rightly nor clearly, he means something like what the later
thinkers say and what is now more clearly seen to be the case.
But these thinkers are, after all, at home only in arguments about
generation and destruction and movement; for it is practically only of
this sort of substance that they seek the principles and the causes.
But those who extend their vision to all things that exist, and of
existing things suppose some to be perceptible and others not
perceptible, evidently study both classes, which is all the more
reason why one should devote some time to seeing what is good in their
views and what bad from the standpoint of the inquiry we have now
before us.
The 'Pythagoreans' treat of principles and elements stranger
than those of the physical philosophers (the reason is that they got
the principles from non-sensible things, for the objects of
mathematics, except those of astronomy, are of the class of things
without movement); yet their discussions and investigations are all
about nature; for they generate the heavens, and with regard to
their parts and attributes and functions they observe the phenomena,
and use up the principles and the causes in explaining these, which
implies that they agree with the others, the physical philosophers,
that the real is just all that which is perceptible and contained by
the so-called 'heavens'. But the causes and the principles which
they mention are, as we said, sufficient to act as steps even up to
the higher realms of reality, and are more suited to these than to
theories about nature.
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