water.

Scriptures written by Pythagoras, another pre-Socratic philosopher, suggest that he developed an earlier theory similar to Plato's Forms. For Pythagoras, like Plato, the substance or essence of all things was not something physical (like water) but rather something abstract. However, Pythagoras' theory was much narrower than Plato's, proposing that the non-physical and timeless essences that compose the physical world are specifically numbers,