It might well be questioned whether the founders of the Eleatic School deserve to rank among Greek poets; for though they wrote hexameters, composing what the Greeks call ?p?, yet it is clear that they did this with no artistic impulse, but only because in the dawn of thought it was easier to use verse than prose for fixed and meditated exposition. The moment in the development of human thought when abstractions were being wrung for the first time with toil from language, and when as yet the vehicle of rhythmic utterance seemed indispensable, is so interesting that a point in favor of Xenophanes and Parmenides may be fairly stretched, and a place may be given them between Hesiod, the creator of didactic poetry, and Empedocles, the inspired predecessor of Lucretius.

The problem which lay before the earliest philosophers of Greece was how to emerge from mythological conceptions concerning the origin and nature of the world into a region of more exact and abstract thought. They had their list of demiurgic agencies, Titans and deities, some of them dramatically personified in the poems of Homer and the legends of Olympus, others but vaguely indicated by the names of Earth and Ocean, Heaven and Time. The polytheistic and mythologizing instincts of the race at large tended to individualize these primal powers with more and more distinctness, collecting legends around the more popular among them, and attributing moral sympathies and passions to those who were supposed to have relations with humanity. But there remained a background of dimly descried and cloudy forces upon which the mythopoeic imagination had taken little hold; and these supplied a starting-point for scientific speculation. It was in this field that the logical faculty of the Greek mind, no less powerful and active than its poetic fancy, came first into play. Thus we find Thales brooding in thought upon the mythus of Oceanus, and arriving at the conception of water as the elementary principle of the universe; while Gaia, or Earth, in like manner is said to have stimulated Pherecydes. Anaximenes is reported to have chosen air as the groundwork of his cosmogony, and Heraclitus developed the material world from fire.

It must not be supposed that any of these early speculators invented a complete hypothesis for deducing phenomena from earth, air, fire, or water as apprehended by the senses. Their elements, or ???a?, are rather to be regarded in the light of symbols—metaphors adopted from experience for shadowing forth an extremely subtle and pervasive substance, a material of supersensible fluidity and elasticity, capable of infinite modification by rarefaction and condensation. At the same time they were seeking after intellectual abstractions; but the problems of philosophy as yet presented themselves in crude and concrete form to their intellects.

A further step in the direction of the abstract was taken by Anaximander, the Milesian astronomer, who is reported to have made a sundial, to have calculated the recurrence of the equinoxes and the solstices, and to have projected geographical charts for the first time in Greece. This practical mathematician derived the universe from the unlimited, t? ?pe????, hurling thought thus at a venture, as it were, into the realm of metaphysical conceptions. It would appear from the dim and hazy tradition which we have received about Anaximander, that he instituted a polemic against the so-called physicists, arguing that to the elements of fire or water there can be attributed a beginning and an ending, but that the abstract indefinite, as uncreate and indestructible, takes precedence of all else. His thought, however, though fruitful of future consequences, was in itself barren; nor have we any reason to conclude that by the ?pe???? he meant more than a primordial substance, or Grund, without quality and without limitation—a void and hollow form containing in itself potentialities of all things. It is characteristic of this early age of Greek speculation that Simplicius found it necessary to criticise even Anaximander for using poetic phraseology, p???t???t????? ???as??. In his polemic, however, he started one of the great puzzles, the contrast between birth and death, and the difficulty of discovering an element subject to neither, which agitated the schools of Greece throughout their long activity.

While the thinkers of Ionia were endeavoring to discover terms of infinite subtlety, through which to symbolize the uniform and unchangeable substance underlying the multiplicity of phenomena, the Pythagoreans in Italy turned their attention to the abstract relations of which numbers are the simplest expression. Numbers, they saw, are both thoughts and also at the same time universally applicable to things of sense. There is nothing tangible which can escape the formulÆ of arithmetic. Mistaking a power of the mind for a power inherent in the universe, they imagined that the figures of the multiplication-table were the essential realities of things, the authentic inner essence of the sensible world; and to number they attributed a mystic potency. Speculation was still so immature that they failed to observe the sterility of the conception. This much, however, they effected: by resting upon the essentially mental conception of quantity, and by apprehending the whole universe as number, they took the first important step in the direction of pure metaphysic.

Anaxagoras of ClazomenÆ, following another path, pronounced that the really efficient agency in the universe is Mind. For this utterance he has been justly eulogized by the metaphysicians of all succeeding centuries. It was, in fact, the starting-point of what in German phraseology is called Begriffsphilosophie. Anaxagoras insisted on a point which had been neglected by his contemporaries—the form-giving activity of mind, as known to us immediately in the human reason—and asserted the impossibility of leaving this out of the account of the universe. But, as Socrates complained, he stopped here, and diverged into material explanations, talking about attraction and repulsion and homogeneous particles, without attempting to connect them with the action of his ????.

Democritus of Abdera, a little later in time than the thinkers who have hitherto been mentioned, was so attracted by the indefinite divisibility of matter that he explained the universe by the theory of a void in which an infinity of atoms moved and met in varied combination. It is well known that this hypothesis, the parent of the Epicurean and the Lucretian systems, has been the main-stay of materialism in all ages, and that it has lately been received into favor by some of the most advanced physicists. Yet it must not be imagined that the Atomism of Democritus was in any true sense scientific according to our acceptation of the term. Like the Infinite of Anaximander, the Mind of Anaxagoras, the Numbers of Pythagoras, the Fire of Heraclitus, his Plenum and Vacuum was a conjectural hypothesis founded upon no experiment or observation properly so called. All these early systems were freaks of fancy, shrewd guesses, poetic thoughts, in which abstractions from language, elementary refinements upon mythology, together with crude speculations about natural objects, were made the groundwork of dogmatism. At the same time thought at this period was both active and creative; nearly all the permanent problems which occur to human ignorance—the antitheses of a beginning and an ending, of being and not being, of rest and motion, of the continuous and the discrete, of the one and the many—the criterion of knowledge and opinion, the antagonism of the senses and the reason, the relation of the vital principle to inanimate existence—were posed in the course of animated controversy. Logic had not been formulated as a method. Philosophical terminology had not as yet been settled. But the logical faculty was working in full vigor, and language was being made to yield abstractions hitherto unapprehended.

This brief survey of the origin of Greek philosophy will enable us to understand the position of the Eleatics. Regarded collectively, and as a school developing a body of doctrine, they advanced in abstraction beyond any of their predecessors or contemporaries. Whereas other philosophers had sought for the abstract in phenomenal elements, the Eleatics went straight through language to the notion of pure being: even the numbers of Pythagoras were not sufficient for the exigencies of their logic. The unity of being, as the one reality, and the absolute impossibility of not-being, revealed by the consciousness and demonstrated by language in the copula ?st?, forms the groundwork of their dogmatism. How important was the principle thus introduced into the fabric of European thought, is evident to every student of the history of philosophy. It is enough in this place to point out to what extent it has influenced our language through such words as entity, existence, essence. The Eleatics may claim as their own coinage the title of all metaphysics—Ontology, or the Science of Being.

In order to make the attitude of these earliest Greek thinkers still more clear, we must return for a moment to Heraclitus, who instituted a polemic against the Eleatic doctrine of Being. He asserted that Being is no more than not-Being. Regarded in itself as an abstraction, Being turns out to be identical with nothing. The relation of Being to not-Being in Becoming formed the central point of his metaphysic, and was enunciated in the axiom, All is flowing, p??ta ?e?. Though the Heraclitean polemic was directed against the school at large, it would be in the last degree inaccurate to treat the Eleatic doctrine, as maintained by Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus, from the point of view of one consistent system. By so doing not only would the truth of history be violated, but one of the most valuable examples of the growth of thought in Greece would be lost.

Xenophanes, who is regarded as the founder of the school, was a native of Colophon. He left his fatherland, and spent the greater portion of his life in Sicily and Magna GrÆcia. We hear of him first at Messana, then at Catana; and there is good reason to believe that he visited the PhocÆan colony of Elea (afterwards Velia) on the western coast of Calabria, a little to the south of PÆstum. At all events, antiquity spoke of him as the father of philosophy at Elea, and Diogenes Laertius mentions a poem of two thousand hexameters which he composed in joint praise of this city and Colophon. Xenophanes lived to a great age. In a couplet preserved from one of his elegies he speaks of having wandered, absorbed in thought and contemplation, for sixty-seven years through Hellas, and fixes twenty-five years as the age at which he began his travels. He was celebrated, like his fellow-countryman, Mimnermus, for his elegiac poetry, some fragments of which are among the most valuable relics we possess of that species of composition. About 538 B.C. is the date usually assigned to him.

The starting-point of philosophy for Xenophanes was found in theology. "Looking up to universal heaven," says Aristotle, "he proclaimed that unity is God." The largest fragment of his metaphysical poem consists of a polemic against polytheism, both as regards the anthropomorphic conception of deity prevalent in Greece, and also as regards the immorality attributed by Homer and Hesiod to the gods. His own god is a high abstraction of mind, one and indivisible, without motion, without beginning or ending, in no way like to man. To the divine unity he attributed thought and volition; but he does not appear to have attempted to connect God with the universe. Like the other speculators of his age and nation, he theoretically deduced the world from simple elements, choosing earth and water, as we gather from some fragments of his poem, for the primordial constituents. At the same time he held a doctrine which afterwards became the central point of Eleatic science. This was a disbelief in the evidence of the senses, a despair of empirical knowledge, which contrasts singularly with his own vehement dogmatism upon the nature of the Divine Being. Thus the originality of Xenophanes consisted in his pronouncing, without proof, that the universe must be regarded as a unity, and that this unity is the Divine Existence, all human mythology being but dreams and delusions. Of his philosophical poem only inconsiderable portions have been preserved. These, however, are sufficient to make clear the line he took, both in his assertion of monotheism and his polemic against the anthropomorphic theology of the Greeks. Such as they are, I have translated them as follows:[44]

Another set of scattered fragments, small in number and meagre in their information, from the poem by Xenophanes on f?s??, show that he held the views afterwards developed by Parmenides concerning the uncertainty of human opinion, and that the elemental substances which he favored in his cosmogonical theory were earth and water. These also I have translated:

The essential weakness of the Eleatic way of thinking was not glaringly apparent, though implicit, in the utterance of Xenophanes. This consisted in the unreconciled antithesis between the world of unity, of true being, of rational thought, and the world of multiplicity, of phenomenal appearance, of opinion. By pushing the tenets of his master to their logical conclusions, and by exchanging theological for metaphysical phraseology, Parmenides, the greatest teacher of the school, exposed the fatal insufficiency of Eleatic dualism. At the same time he achieved an ever-memorable triumph in philosophy by forcing the problem of essential reality upon the earliest Greek speculators, and by defining the battle-ground of future ontological controversy.

Parmenides, a native of Elea, who flourished about the year 503 B.C., enjoyed a reputation in his native city scarcely inferior to that of Pythagoras at Crotona, of Empedocles at Acragas, or of Solon at Athens. Speusippus, quoted by Diogenes Laertius, asserts that the magistrates of Elea were yearly sworn to observe the laws enacted by Parmenides. Cebes talks about a "Pythagorean or Parmenidean mode of life," as if the austere ascesis of the Samian philosopher had been adopted or imitated by the Eleatic. Indeed, there is good reason to suppose that Parmenides held intercourse with members of the Pythagorean sect, his neighbors in the south of Italy. Diogenes Laertius relates that he was united in the bonds of closest friendship to Ameinias and DiochÆtes, two Pythagoreans. Of these the latter was a poor man, but excellent in breeding and in character; Parmenides so loved him and respected him that, when he died, he dedicated a hero's chapel to his memory. The philosophers of this period in Greece, as might be proved abundantly, were no mere students but men of action and political importance. Their reputation for superior wisdom caused them to be consulted in affairs of state, and to be deferred to in matters of constitutional legislation. Some of them, like Thales, Anaximander, and Empedocles, were employed on works of public utility. Others, like Pythagoras, remodelled the society of cities, or, like Anaxagoras, through their influence with public men like Pericles, raised the tone of politics around them. All of them devoted a large portion of their time and attention to the study of public questions. It was this kind of prestige, we may conjecture, which, in the next phase of Greek thought, threw so much power into the hands of sophists, and which finally encouraged Plato in his theory that those states would be best governed where the sages were the rulers.

Of Parmenides himself some precious notices have been preserved by Plato. It appears that the great Eleatic teacher visited Athens in his old age. Socrates was a young man at the period of this visit; and Plato, whether inventing an occasion for their meeting or relying on actual tradition, brings them into conversation. In the prelude to the dialogue Parmenides, we read:[45]

The TheÆtetus contains another allusion to Parmenides, which proves in what reverence the old philosopher was held by Socrates:

Finally, in the Sophistes a passing allusion to the same event is put into the mouth of Socrates: "I remember hearing Parmenides use the latter of the two methods, when I was a young man and he was far advanced in years, in a very noble discussion." These notices of the Eleatic sage, we feel, are not in any sense accidental. Plato has introduced them in important moments of his three most studied dialogues upon those very points which occupied the mind of Parmenides, and by the elaboration of which he made his greatest contribution to philosophy. The problems of knowledge and of the relation of the phenomenal universe to real existence were for the first time methodically treated in the school of Elea. Their solution in the theory of Ideas was the main object of Plato's philosophical activity.

The unity asserted by Xenophanes gave its motto to the Eleatic school; ?? t? p??ta became their watchword. Parmenides, however, abstracted from this unity all theological attributes. Plain existence, obtained apparently by divesting thought of all qualifications derived from sensation and imagination, and regarding it in primitive and abstract nakedness or nothingness, was the only positive condition which he left to the principle of Being; and though he seems to have identified this Being with Thought, we must be careful not to be misled by modern analogies into fancying that his ???? involved a purely intellectual idealism. Nor, again, can we regard it as the totality of things presented to the senses; the most earnest polemic of the philosopher is directed against this view. The Unity, the Being, of Parmenides, was in truth the barest metaphysical abstraction, deduced, we are tempted to believe, in the first instance from a simple observation of language, and yet, when formed, not wholly purged from corporeity. Being is proved by the word ?st?. The singular number indicates the unity of the subject; the present tense proves its eternity, for it neither asserts a has been nor a will be, but an everlasting is. Its antithesis not-Being is impossible and inconceivable; ??? ?st?. Completing his conception of Being as the sole reality, and carrying out the arguments attributed by Aristotle to his master,[46] Parmenides shows that the eternal One is indivisible, immovable, continuous, homogeneous, absolutely self-identical, beyond the reach of birth, or change, or dissolution. Furthermore, it is finite and spheroid. In rounding and completing his notion of the Unity of Being, Parmenides seems at this point to have passed into the region of geometrical abstractions. The sphere of mathematics requires to be circumscribed by a superficies equidistant at all points from the centre. These conditions of perfection Parmenides attributed to Being, forgetting that the finite sphere thus conceived by him implied, by a necessity of human thought, a beyond against which it should be defined. At the same time, this geometrical analogy prevents us from assuming that the further identification of Being with Thought excluded a concrete and almost material conception of the Ens.

As opposed to this unique ????, the sole and universal reality, which can only be apprehended by the reason, and which is eternally and continuously One, Parmenides places the totality of phenomena, multiplex, diverse, subject to birth, change, division, dissolution, motion. These, he asserts, are non-existent, the illusions of the senses, mere names, the vague and unreal dreamworld of impotent mortals. Not having advanced in his analysis of thought beyond the first category of Being, he felt obliged to abandon the multiplicity of things as hopeless and unthinkable. Yet he cannot deny their phenomenal existence; there they are, deceiving the sage and the simple man alike: experience asserts them; language and the opinion of humanity take them for granted as realities. Parmenides feels bound to offer an explanation of this cosmos of illusion, this many-formed and many-colored mirage. His teaching consequently contains a paradox deeply embedded in its very substance. Having first expounded the law of absolute truth, he proceeds to render a grave and meditated account of error. Having demonstrated the sole existence of abstract Being, he turns a page and begins to discourse, like any physicist of his age in Greece, concerning Light and Night, Hot and Cold, Fire and Earth, Active and Passive, Male and Female, Rare and Dense. By a singular irony of fate it was precisely for this portion of his teaching that he received the praise of Bacon in the Novum Organum. To connect the doctrine of Being, t? p??? ????e?a?, and the doctrine of Appearance, t? p??? d??a?, was beyond his power. It was what Plato afterwards attempted in his theory of ideas, and Aristotle in the theory of forms and matter, e?d? and ???. Parmenides himself seems to have regarded man as a part of the cosmos, subject to its phantasmagoric changes and illusions, yet capable of comprehending that, while the substratum of Being is alone immutable, real, and one, all else is shifting, non-existent, and many. Neglect, he says, the object of sense, the plurality of things obedient to change, and you will arrive at the object of reason, the unity that alters not and can be only apprehended by thought. Yet, while on the one hand he did not disdain to theorize the universe of sense, so, on the other hand, as already hinted, he had not arrived at the point of abstracting corporeity from Being. To do this from his point of view was indeed impossible. Having posited pure Being as the sole reality, he was obliged to form a figurative presentation of it to his own mind. A new stage had to be accomplished by human thought before the intellect could fairly grapple with the problems nakedly and paradoxically propounded by the sage of Elea.

From the immense importance attached by Parmenides to the verb ?st?, and from his assertion that men deal with names and not with realities, it followed that to his metaphysical teaching a logical set of corollaries had to be appended. To construct these was the task of Zeno, his beloved pupil and authorized successor. Zeno undertook to maintain the Parmenidean Unity, both against the vulgar evidence of the senses and also against philosophers who, like Heraclitus, directed their attention to the flux and multiplicity of things. His method was, not to prove the necessity of unity at rest, but to demonstrate the contradictions involved in the ideas of plurality and motion. The intellectual difficulties implied in the divisibility of time and space and matter were developed by Zeno with a force and subtlety that justified Aristotle in calling him the founder of dialectic. His logic, however, was but the expansion of positions implicit in Xenophanes and clearly indicated by Parmenides. How the Eleatic arguments, as further handled by Melissus, helped the Sophists, and influenced the school of Megara, who went so far as to refuse any but identical propositions, are matters that belong to another chapter of Greek history. So, too, is Plato's attempt to resolve the antinomies revealed in human thought by the polemic of his predecessors. Enough has now been said to serve as preface to the following version of the fragments of Parmenides.

His poem—for, strange as it must always seem, Parmenides committed the exposition of his austerely abstract and argumentative doctrine to hexameters—begins with an epical allegory. He feigns to have been drawn by horses on a chariot to the house of Truth: the horses may, perhaps, be taken, as in Plato's vision of the PhÆdrus, to symbolize faculties of the soul; and the gates of Truth open upon two roads—one called the way of night, or error; the other, of light, or real knowledge. The goddess who dwells here, divine Sophia, instructs him equally in the lore of truth and of opinion, and makes no attempt, as will be seen from her own words, to conceal the futility of the second part of her discourse. From a literary point of view the poem has no merit. Even the exordium is stiff and tame. It begins thus:

Here the exordium, as we possess it, ends, and we start upon the fragments of the lecture addressed by divine Sophia to the mortal sage. The order and the connection of these fragments are more than doubtful. So much, however, is clear, that they fall into two sections—the first treating of scientific truth, the second of popular opinion. The instrument of knowledge in the one case is the reason; in the other the senses bear confused and untrustworthy witness to phenomena.

Some light is thrown upon these fragments by a passage in the Sophistes of Plato, where the Eleatic stranger is made to say: "In the days when I was a boy, the great Parmenides protested against this (i.e., against asserting the existence of not-being), and to the end of his life he continued to inculcate the same lesson—always repeating, both in verse and out of verse, Keep your mind from this way of inquiry, for never will you show that not-being is." The fragment which immediately follows, if we are right in assuming the continuity and order of its verses, forms the longest portion of the poem extant.

The divine Sophia calls the speech which she is about to utter deceptive (?pat????), because it has to do no longer with the immutable and imperturbable laws of entity, but only with the delusions to which the human mind is exposed by the evidence of the senses. If Parmenides had been in any true sense of the word a poet, he would not have subjected Sophia to the ridicule of condemning her own observations, when he might have invented some other machinery for the conveyance of his physical hypothesis. Nothing, in fact, can be more artistically monstrous than to put lies into the mouth of Truth personified. The fragments of this portion of his poem may, in spite of their scientific worthlessness, be translated, if only for the sake of completeness. We must suppose, therefore, that Wisdom has resumed her parable, and is speaking as follows:

At this point in the murky exposition there shines forth a single line, which, seized upon by poets and poetic souls in after-years, traverses the dismal waste of false physics and imperfect metaphysics like a streak of inspiration—"fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky."

It is only by a complete translation of the extant fragments of Parmenides that any notion can be formed of the hiatus between what he chose to call truth and what he termed opinion. As a thinker, he revealed both the weakness of his metaphysical system and the sincerity of his intention by proclaiming this abrupt division between the realm of the pure reason and the field of the senses, without attempting a synthesis. No other speculator has betrayed the vanity of dogmatism about the absolute more conclusively by the simultaneous presentation of lame guesses in the region of the relative. The impartial student of his verse is forced to the conclusion that the titles t? p??? ????e?a? and t? p??? d??a?, which have been given to the two departments of his exposition, are both arbitrary; for what warrant have we that his intuitions into the nature of pure being are more certain than his guesses about the conditions of phenomenal existence? Parmenides might, indeed, be selected as a parable of the human mind pretending to a knowledge of the unconditioned truth, and, after all, arriving at nothing more cogent than opinion. The innumerable ontological assertions which in the pride of the speculative reason have been made by men are d??a?; and the epigram pointed by Parmenides against the common folk is equally applicable to his own sect—

As soon as men begin to dogmatize, whether the supposed truth to which they pin their faith be the barest metaphysical abstraction or some assumed intuition into the divine nature, they create a schism between the multiplicity of the universe and the unity which they proclaim. In other words, they distinguish, like Parmenides, between what they arbitrarily denote as truth and what they cannot account for as phenomena. To quit the sphere of our own mind is impossible; and, therefore, nothing can be discovered which is not some mode of the mind. The utmost the metaphysician can do is to describe the operations of the human intellect without explaining its existence, and all systematized knowledge is but a classification of the categories of consciousness. Thus the sophistic position that man is for man the measure of all things is irrefutable. But when he attempts to hypostasize his own thoughts as realities, to argue outward from his conceptions to the universe, this is the same as taking a leap in the dark across an undefined abyss from the only ascertained standing-ground to a hypothetical beyond.

During the two-and-twenty centuries which have elapsed since the days of Parmenides, the philosophers have learned wisdom. They are now too wary to parade the distinction between two kinds of opinion, and to construct one system of truth, another of illusion. They either content themselves with omitting what they regard as the insoluble, or they endeavor to invent an all-embracing schema, which shall supersede the cruder distinctions between subject and object, mind and nature, ego and non-ego. Yet nothing in the realm of absolute knowledge has been gained in all this space of time.

The owl of Minerva, to quote one of Hegel's most luminous epigrams, still starts upon its flight when the evening twilight, succeeding the day of work, has fallen. Metaphysic goes on shaping from the human consciousness a fabric which it calls reality. Science has magnified and multiplied phenomena until, instead of one, we have in every case a million problems to employ intelligence. Social conditions grow more complex, and more and more is ascertained about the inner life of man. But the fact remains that, while theologian, logician, physicist, and moralist, each from his own standing-point, may cry "Eureka!" we can know nothing in itself. The most complicated system, created by the Aristotle of the modern world, involves at the outset an assumption. From reflection on the laws of human thought, on the varied acquisitions of the human mind, and on the successive phases of human history, it carries over the synthetic statement of its conclusions to the account of the universe. In other words, it postulates the identity of the human and the divine mind, and ends by asserting that thought is the only reality. Does not a fallacy lie in this, that while the mind possesses the faculty of reflecting upon itself, everything which it knows is of necessity expressed in terms of itself, and therefore in pretending to give an account of the universe it is only giving an account of its own operations? The philosophy of the IdÉe is thus a way of looking at things; to explain them or deduce them is beyond its reach. How, for example, except by exercise of faith, by dogmatism and initial begging of the question, can we be assured that an intelligence differently constituted from the human mind should not cognize a different ??s?? ???t??, or intelligible world, and be equally justified in claiming to have arrived at truth? It is comparatively easy to acquire encyclopÆdic knowledge, to construct a system, to call the keystone of the system the IdÉe, and to assert that the IdÉe is God. But is all this of any value except as a machine for arranging and formulating thoughts and opinions? At the end of philosophies one feels tempted to exclaim: