It is true that European philosophical thought was born by the Ionian materialist philosophers. But in every spiritual activity that begins to exist, there is usually continuity. Actions converging and diverging in relation to the initial course, come to contribute to its development.
In contrast, then, to the first philosophical achievements of the Ionian spirit, came the answers of the Doric one, from Greeks of Lower Italy. In fact, the aristocratic, theocratic and puritanical views that were gradually expressed, departed from the materialistic direction and led to a more transcendental, mystical view of the world.
The Orphic and Pythagorean philosophers, therefore, led by Pythagoras (570-496 BC), subjugated the physical world to a transcendental reality, projecting on the concept of the physical body metaphysical beliefs related to the soul. The Pythagoreans expressed the belief in the distinction between body and soul, between the apparent and the real.
A special feature of Pythagorean philosophy was the attachment of greater importance to numbers than to bodies in the study of the physical world, leading philosophical thought to a kind of mysticism. Essentially, the Pythagoreans deified the numbers, as shown in their following text:
"We must consider the works and the essence of the number according to the power that is in the decade. So, great is the power (of numbers) and complete and omnipotent and divine and heavenly life's and human's principle and guide etc .. And without it, everything is infinite and invisible etc .. No lie is accepted by the nature of the number, etc. "
In response to the beliefs of the Materialists and the Pythagorean philosophers came that of the Eleats, led by Parmenides (515-440 B.C ..). His point of view came in reaction to the motile universe of Heraclitus. He ruled out the beginning and the end, the birth and the death, the increase and the decay, the movement and the change, the division and the discontinuity of the Heraclitic being. This is how he explained the physical world as an apparent world.
The Pythagorean and Eleatic philosophers caused the division of the concept of the materialistic life of the Ionian philosophers into matter and energy, leading to the birth of spiritualism and materialism.
