1. POLYBUS, son-in-law of Hippocrates, the founder of scientific medicine, opened his treatise "on the nature of man" with a lively polemic. He attacked physicians and litterati who represented the human body as composed of a single substance. Some declared this "All-in-one" to be air, others fire, and others again water, and each of them, according to Polybus, "supported his doctrine by evidence and proofs which in reality mean nothing." The truth of the assertion, declared its author, becomes as clear as daylight if one watches the dialectic tourneys devised for the entertainment of the public. For while he who is in possession of the truth makes it triumph always everywhere, here victory falls to the chance possessor of the most persuasive tongue. And this memorable concludes by saying, "So far as I can see, these people throw one another successfully by means of their speeches, and by their imprudence they help the thesis of Melissus on its legs."

Now, arguments which help a doctrine on its legs, which support it and strengthen it, that is to say, may fairly be supposed to have prepared the way for it and to have contributed to its first appearance. We shall, therefore, be well advised not to lose sight of this incisive remark, but to bear it in mind, when we are looking for the principle of the Eleatic doctrine. Its fullest expression is associated with Melissus, a Samian noble, whose date is definitely fixed by the naval victory he won over the Athenians in 441 B.C. Above

all, we shall have to fix our attention on two important aspects of this inquiry. We shall have to determine what relation was borne by Polybus to the nature-philosophers whom he attacked with such uncompromising vigour, as well as to the metaphysician of Samos, whom we may fairly include as a member of the Eleatic school. Polybus is severed from his adversaries by wide differences of opinion, but the worst reproach that he levels at them is that they assisted the victory of Melissus. This sounds like the admonition of a good patriot to whom party conflicts and differences are immaterial when a worse enemy is knocking at the door. And such was actually the case. The sharpest contrast with the physicists and natural philosophers, of all kinds and schools, was formed by those whom the biting wit of their contemporaries stigmatized as "unnatural philosophers" or "stoppers-of-the-universe." The "thesis" of Melissus meant nothing else, to use his own words, than that "we neither see nor know what is." The brilliant world by which we are surrounded, and of which our senses bring us tidings, is a mere semblance and deception. All change, all motion, all growth, and all occurrences, everything that provides matter for natural science and speculation is a dream, a shadow, and nothing more. The one reality behind this phantasmagoric illusion is--what? The two pioneers of this school of thought part company here. In the destructive part of their doctrines they agree, but they are not completely at one in the positive solutions that succeed it. It will be well, then, to consider the doubts and negations which they shared in common, having previously acquainted ourselves with the older and more important representative of the doctrines.

2. The senior of Melissus was Parmenides, the veritable founder of the famous doctrine of unity. He was born at Elea as the son of prosperous and respected parents, whose position would naturally have entitled him to take part in political life. He is said to have drawn up a code of laws for Elea, and the well-authenticated reference which fixes his floruit in the 69th Olympiad (504-501 B.C.) may be taken as the date of some public act of this kind.

Xenophanes, whose death must have occurred after 478 B.C., survived that Olympiad by a quarter of a century, and the two great men had undoubtedly been intimately acquainted. But we shall do well to beware of regarding Parmenides the pupil of Xenophanes, for the brief sojourn of the wandering rhapsodist in the home of his adoption precluded him from working as a teacher. On the other hand, we are acquainted with the names of two Pythagoreans, one of whom, Aminias, is said to have given Parmenides an impulse to philosophic inquiry, while to the other, Diochaites, he felt himself so much indebted that he dedicated a "heroon," or memorial chapel, to the memory of his master. We shall presently see that, as a fact, the philosophic system of Parmenides owed as much to Pythagoras as to Xenophanes. The disciple of Pythagoras was ready to build up his pantheistic doctrine in the forms of strict evidence borrowed from the science of mathematics, but the peculiar direction of thought which he gave to it shows beyond dispute that Pythagorism did not fully satisfy him. And if his thought was founded on the pantheism of Xenophanes, and its lines were determined by the mathematics of Pythagoras, it set compass by yet a third system, namely, that of Heraclitus. For it was the doctrine of flux, first formulated by the sage of Ephesus, which made the deepest impression on the mind of Parmenides. It sounded the bottom of his scepticism and impelled him, as it impelled his successors, to adopt conclusions of the kind in which the characteristic speculation of the Eleatics found its most powerful expression. The younger representative of the school may perhaps be taken as the mouthpiece of this scepticism. His lucid and flowing prose will at least be more refreshing in our ears than the didactic poetry of his master, with its closely-packed arguments and crowded sentences. Melissus' account runs as follows :-

Two conditions are accordingly required in the things of sense: the inviolable stability of their existence, and the inviolable stability of their qualities. In respect to each of these demands, they are weighed in the balance and found wanting. They are reproached at once for their perishability and for their mutability. And if the two demands, and respectively the two conclusions, appear as if they were one, the fault lies in the ambiguity, which had not yet been recognized, of the verb "to be" in its two-fold sense, (I) of "existence," as " the sun is," and (2) of a mere copula, as " the sun is a luminary." Nor shall we discuss the question whether or not Melissus was justified in dismissing the perishable and mutable to the realm of visionary appearance. But we can very well conceive that the search for a sound, we might say a robust, object of cognition was not successful in the province of sensible things in an age when the science of matter was in so rudimentary a stage. The leaf which is full of sap and verdant today is sere and yellow tomorrow, and brown and shrivelled the day after. Where, then, are we to seize the Thing itself; how recognize and grasp its permanent element? Heraclitus compendiously summarized these everyday experiences, and extended them beyond the confines of

actual observation, clothing his resultant scepticism with paradoxical garb which challenged the common sense of mankind. Thus, supposing the impulse to knowledge could not rest satisfied in the view of the bare uniform succession of phenomena, not merely was it now deprived of its foothold, but the natural desire for a harmony of thought, wholly free from contradictions, was disturbed and impelled to protestation. It was unsatisfactory enough to have to acquiesce in the view that "the things of the sensible world are involved in incessant transformation," but sound reason rose in revolt against further principle that "things are and they are not," and the spirit of rebellion was strongest among men of most disciplined minds. No wonder, then, that those who enjoyed the benefits of a Pythagorean or mathematical training were most strongly affected by this reaction, and it is not surprising that Parmenides, with his Pythagorean traditions, should have stigmatized as "the twin roads of error" the common philosophy that basked in the reality of the sensible world, and, secondly, the doctrine of Heraclitus. He assailed that doctrine with the most poisoned shafts of his invective. Those "to whom being and not-being are at once the same and not the same" he denounces as "deaf and blind, helplessly staring, a confused herd ;" "double-headed" he calls them on account of the double aspect of their Janus-like theory of things; and the fate which his satire reserves for them is to fall into their own stream of flux and be carried away on its flood; "know-nothings" he calls them, and "retrograde is their path" like the metamorphoses of their primary matter.

Characteristic as these outbreaks are for the spirit of the Eleatic philosopher and his relation to the doctrine of Heraclitus, his quarrel with his second and more important adversary, the general opinion of mankind, is yet more fascinating and instructive. The excitement by which he was moved can be felt in his panting sentences and verses; with breathless energy he struck at the popular conception of the world, and the ringing strokes of his scepticism fell like the blows of an axe. His iconoclastic method was applied to the reality of sensible objects, to birth and death, and every motion and change.

We may quote the following phrases from the negative part of his work:

And next to these negatives we may put the following affirmative utterances. The thing that is is not merely "not-become and imperishable," and accordingly "without beginning and end ; "not merely are "changes of place and shiftings of hue unknown to it," but it is a limited and thinking being, an "indivisible whole, uniform, continuous, similar in all its parts, not being less here and greater there, but resembling the bulk of a well-rounded and equably weighted ball." At these words the reader experiences somewhat the same kind of shock as when he is startled from a dream. A moment ago we were soaring beyond the aerial stars, and now the confines of reality are closing in on us again. Parmenides, too, it would appear, essayed a flight on the wings of Icarus above the region of experience into the ethereal domains of pure being. But his strength betrayed him halfway ; he sank, and fell to the familiar plains of corporeal existence. The truth is, his theory of Being prepared the way for the kindred conceptions of later ontologists without being identical with those theories. It was still of the earth earthy ; it brings us to the forecourt, but not to the fane, of metaphysics.

3. At this point we shall do well to revert to the dictum of Polybus, from which we started. The philosophic physician recognized that the self-contradictory statements the physicists lent force to the scepticism of Elea. He would doubtless have had us understand that those who declared all things to be air denied, but with a single reservation, the trustworthiness of the evidence of the senses; that the same held good, with merely a change in the reservation, of those who replaced air by water or fire. Representatives of this doctrine must have played into the hands of thinkers, if they did not actually engender them, who would lump together the concordant negatives

and strike out the contradictory affirmatives; these would cancel one another, like the items on a balance-sheet, and the thinkers would merely have to add the separate negations of the "physicists" to one grand total negation. No one who follows out this thought will cherish a moment's hesitation as to the source of Parmenides' theory of Being. It is a kind of dividend, the residue or deposit of the spontaneous disintegration of the doctrine of primary matter. The various forms in which that doctrine had clothed itself in turn were full of implicit contradictions which presently disproved one another, and the greater then was the influence on mankind of the common truth that underlay them when the clash of opinions had cleared away. Aristotle's words, it is "the common doctrine of the physicists," by whom he meant the nature-philosophers from Thales downwards, that matter is neither generated nor destroyed. This doctrine was domiciled in the mind of the cultivated Greek for the full span of a century; and considering how often it changed its form, and how brilliantly it survived those transformations, it is not surprising that it should ultimately have ranked as unimpeachable, and have been invested with well-nigh axiomatic force. To quote Aristotle once more, this "ancient and undisputed tenet" derived point and pith from the reaction against the doctrine of Heraclitus, and at the same time it was extended by other contributions into the source of which we have now to inquire.

We are already acquainted with the first and most important of these contributions. Unchangeability was added to eternity as an attribute of the universal being, filling all space, in the system of Parmenides. It differed from the primary beings of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus in escaping the liability to manifold modification, transformation, and rehabilitation. It is today in nature and condition the same as it ever was and as it ever will be. Nay, one of Parmenides' expressions even seems to cast doubt on the passage of time itself; and, seeing that nothing happened in time, that reality was denied to each and every temporal process, there was actually nothing left for the time-conception to denote. Parmenides' power of abstraction reached its zenith at this point, but his mind did not dwell there for long, and he reverted with increased impressiveness to the unchangeableness of his spatial being. He added the condition of qualitative constancy to that of quantitative constancy, the germ of which, at least, had been contained in the doctrine of primary matter from the very beginning, and had gradually come to clearer expression through the influence of Anaximenes in particular. The constitution of matter was to remain unaltered at the same time that its mass was to be exempt from increase and diminution. This extension of the doctrine was entirely native to its spirit, as we hope to show by a brief digression lying a little outside the chronological limits of our immediate inquiry. Anaxagoras, whose name will occupy us presently, was, so far as we know, in no wise influenced by the teaching of Parmenides. Still, the common foundations of their theories were surmounted by the same super-structure, and a telling fragment from his work which has only recently been discovered, will best illustrate the method by which he and many others arrived at this extension of the doctrine of primary matter. "How," he asks, "should hair have come from not-hair and flesh from not-flesh ?" and herein he fancies he has disproved a sheer impossibility. In order to follow Anaxagoras, we must re-member the fascination exercised by language on the minds even of the deepest philosophers. Matter is eternal, and out of nothing there can never come something; this, as we saw just now, had already passed into a commonplace. The transition thence to the new axiom was easy and imperceptible. If a being never comes from a not-being, why should such-and-such a being ever come from not-such-and-such a being? Both postulates would be covered by a single formula: no being can come from a not-being, no white from a not-white, and so forth. We have already had occasion to remark the equivocal use of the word "to-be," and its vacillation between the meaning of "existence" and its employment as a copula to join the subject to the predicate. But though the new postulate may and must have arisen in this way, though the association of ideas and the ambiguity of language may have helped to call it in existence, yet its value and significance are not therefore condemned. The belief in causation was likewise born in darkness, as the child of the associative faculty, but the obscurity of its origin would not reconcile us to abandoning its lead, now that experience is ever confirming the ample promise it contained, and now that the scion of the inductive canon has been grafted on the wild stock. Nay, supposing the impossible were to happen ; supposing the staff which guided the steps of our forebears on this planet through myriads of years were to break asunder in our hand ; supposing water suddenly to cease to quench our thirst, and oxygen to feed the process of combustion; even on this wild hypothesis we should yet have had no alternative, we should yet be unrepentant of having held the belief that the future would resemble the past; we should yet not regret having followed the only path open to us through a maze and wilderness of natural phenomena.

The case is similar, though not quite the same, when we come to the twofold postulates for the stability or constancy of matter. Not quite the same, because the world would still not necessarily be reduced to chaos; purposeful action would not be an impossibility, provided there existed phenomenal processes, held together by the bond of causal uniformities, even without any permanent substratum. But no good purpose is served by fantastic suppositions of this kind. Presupposing the existence of material bodies, and presupposing likewise the series of experiences on which, as we have seen, the doctrine of primary matter depended for its source and strength, the progress of science was then indeed bound up with the growing belief in the permanence, quantitatively and qualitatively, of the contents of space. This was the sole condition for comprehending the universe and for inferring the future from the past; and the demand for this condition must have powerfully fostered the popularity of the new belief, if it did not actually engender it. But there are still, even at this date, considerable distinctions to be drawn between the two branches of the doctrine. We believe today that nothing comes from nothing, and nothing passes into nothing. The opposite opinion has been proved to be nugatory time after time, especially in departments of thought where modern science has made most progress; we possess, too, the additional negative proof that no single trustworthy instance has ever been adduced to the contrary. Still, the statement that nothing can come from nothing, and that nothing can pass into nothing, is one that we have no right to concede either to Parmenides himself or to his countless anti-empirical successors. Its apparent philosophic necessity is the merest delusion. The method was to introduce new elements in a conception--in this instance, the conception of being-and then, when they had coalesced among themselves and with their verbal husk, to mistake the artificial product for a natural, if not for a supernatural, product. Eternal permanence was first given the name of "being," and subsequently it was clearly demonstrated that such a being could neither arise nor decay, inasmuch as in that case it would not be a being at all. It is otherwise with the second of these twin postulates, which is still the almost exclusive property of the strict scientist of today. Its opposition to the evidence of sense is considerably greater than that of the older twin. It is far more a guiding star for the investigators than a goal which they have reached and maintained by means of experience. Briefly stated, as developed by modern science, the postulate amounts to simply this: In all natural phenomena there is a central string of occurrences which radiates in countless branches. That central string is composed of nothing but processes of motion, and we may call the objects in which these movements or changes of position occur with approximate accuracy bodies devoid of quality. The branches or radii are the sensuous impressions which produce the appearance of a change of quality. We may illustrate this theorem by a few examples. There is the wave of air, and the impression of sound which corresponds to it; there is the wave of ether, and the corresponding impression of light; and there is a chemical process denoting in the ultimate resort a separation, conjunction, or shifting of particles of matter, with the corresponding impression of taste or smell. We are already acquainted with the processes of motion in the realm of optics and acoustics, corresponding with the qualitative impressions which they radiate. When we come to chemistry, however, our information is by no means so complete. It was only the other day that a distinguished physiologist described as the task of the future "Newton of chemistry"–

And the same author declares, touching the beginnings of this ideal science, that he is not aware of

4. Our digression has led us a long way from Parmenides, but we felt it due to the curiosity of our readers and to the memory of the old philosopher to hint at the fruits folded in his doctrine of the unchangeability of matter like the flower in the bud. Moreover, it will have helped us to understand and to appreciate the most paradoxical portions of his teaching. We perceive without overmuch surprise that, granting the postulate or assertion of material unchangeability, with the nourishment it derived, by means not unfamiliar to us, from correct conjecture and delusive association, the reverse side of the theory was the rejection of the evidence of the senses. Their testimony contradicted the postulate, and their trustworthiness was accordingly denied. There is a gap, however, in the logical consistency of this argument, for no other witness than that of touch, or rather of muscular resistance, could be conclusively quoted for the belief in the existence of the contents of space, and even of space itself. Still, Parmenides was plainly quite honest in his conviction that he had expelled from his universe everything dependent on the perception of the senses. He erred in this conviction. He shared with Immanuel Kant, to mention but one out of many, his mistake of the sensuous origin of the idea of space, but he cannot fairly be blamed for it. It is more astonishing that, while he left space and its corporeal contents undisturbed, he dismissed to the limbo of appearance that movement in space which depends on the same evidence. The contradiction cannot be evaded, and we may perhaps explain it as follows. The fact most incredible to Parmenides was the change of quality. Now, if we remember how much is comprised in the conceptions of organic structure, growth, development, and decay; if we reflect that in wide tracts of natural life these changes of quality go hand-in-hand with movement in space, including changes of volume; if we further add that the essential connection of both series of facts came to exalted expression in Heraclitus' doctrine of flux, which coupled incessant changes of place with incessant changes of quality, we shall see that it was perfectly natural that the sworn foe of that doctrine should never have succeeded in dividing the halves so intimately bound together, but should rather have included them both in a common condemnation. This tendency, so strong in itself, was considerably strengthened by an outside influence. Parmenides contested in unequivocal language, which however has but seldom been rightly understood, the existence of a vacuum. His argument, we may remark in parenthesis, is of considerable historical importance as affording the sole evidence of the presence of the opinion at that date. Nor was it present in a mere rudimentary form. It had already assumed that developed shape which distinguished and comprised the conceptions of continuous space void of corporeal contents, and of interstices existing in the bodies themselves and separating their particles from one another. As to the origin of this theory, it is merely a conjecture, but a safe one, that, designed as it was to explain the fact of motion, it sprang from the circle of the Pythagoreans, who were unique at that time in devoting serious attention to the problems of mechanics. Parmenides and those who thought with him would have seen in the acknowledgment of a vacuum a being or existence of the not-being. He was accordingly impelled to dispute the emptiness of space, and thus the fact of movement itself would appear to him inexplicable and, therefore, impossible. In this way the universe of Parmenides rises visibly before our eyes, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that it visibly grows less and less. We have watched the disappearance of all differences in sensuous objects and their various states; we have watched the vanishing of all changes of place from the universe which was not denied spatial extension and contents, and what, we may ask, is now left? Nothing but a bare uniform homogeneous mass, a lump of matter without form or contour,--nothing else would have been left to the mind of any one but a Greek, with his instinct for form and beauty, who was at once a poet and a disciple of Pythagoras. It was solely due, in our opinion, to this combination of qualities that the infinite became finite, and the formless became beautiful in the shape of that "well-rounded ball" with which we have already made acquaintance. For there is no possible doubt that, consistently with the premises of the system of Parmenides, we should have expected an infinite rather than a finite extension of the spatial Being. Every boundary is a barrier; and how, one might ask, could it come to pass that the only genuine all-inclusive Being, suffering nothing, not even nothingness, to exist beside itself, was at once bounded and barred? Proofs of this kind would doubtless have been adduced to fill up any lacuna in the doctrine of Parmenides, and a considerable degree of inner credibility would have attached to them. But, as a matter of fact, there is no such lacuna at all. Parmenides tells us the precise contrary in quite unequivocal language; and though, owing to the loss or irremediable mutilation of that portion of his work, we shall never know his logical defence of it, yet we can hazard a very fair guess at its psychological foundation. We have already anticipated one part of this inquiry. Parmenides was a Greek, which is equivalent to saying that his mind was imaginative and poetical, and was thus protected from the logical consequences of his premises. Add to this that in the Pythagorean tables of contraries the unlimited was ranged with the imperfect. Moreover, ludicrous as it sounds, it can hardly be denied that the sworn foe of sensuous appearances fell a victim at this point to a grave optical delusion. For did not in truth the apparent globe of heaven, which is stretched as a vault above our heads, give rise to the Parmenidean conception of the globular form of the only true Being? There is yet another question to be considered. Was the universal Being of Parmenides merely matter, merely corporeal and extended? And did its author, who valued rigour of thought above all things, relegate thought and consciousness to the outer darkness of appearance? This seems well-nigh incredible; the supposition is rather forced on us that for Parmenides, as Spinoza might have said, thought and extension were the two attributes of one substance, and the real was at once the thinking and the extended. We cannot support this opinion by any fragment of his teaching that has come down to us. There are but two sentences which could possibly be interpreted in that sense--"thinking and being are the same," and "thinking, and that of which it is the thought, are the same;" but the context in each instance forbids it. They mean nothing more than that the genuine thing "That is is the only object of thought, and that thinking can never be directed to the thing that is-not. But, in default of direct statement and unimpeachable testimony, the fact may be determined by internal evidence. The doctrine of Parmenides supplied dogmatic materialism with some of its most powerful weapons, but the master himself was never

a consistent materialist. As such he could not have been reputed a disciple of Xenophanes. As such his place would have been untenable within the Eleatic school between the pantheists Xenophanes and Melissus. As such Plato, bitter enemy of materialists and atheists, would never have addressed him as "the great," and would never have rendered him a degree of homage which he withheld from rest of his predecessors in philosophy. And if the supposition be simply incredible on these grounds, the last traces of hesitation are removed by the example of Spinoza, which we have quoted already, and the parallelism the Vedanta philosophers of India. The material Being of Parmenides was incontestably a spiritual Being as well. It is universal matter and universal spirit at once,

but the matter is sterile because capable of no expansion, and the spirit powerless because capable of no action.

5. Parmenides built a lofty system of philosophy, but it strikes cold on the senses with a dismal feeling of monotony. One almost wonders if the architect entirely escaped that impression. Hardly, it would seem; for he did not rest satisfied with the formulation of his "Words of Truth," but he followed them up--on phenomenal lines, as we should now say --by his "Words of Opinion." Many previous workers in this field have been unable to contain their astonishment that Parmenides should have taken this step; to our own thinking, it would have been more remarkable if he had omitted it. He was a man deeply immersed in the science of his age; his mind was exceptionally inventive and exceptionally agile, and he was not likely to content himself with the reiterated repetition of a few meagre principles, important enough in their consequences, but mostly of a negative tendency. He found himself prevailed on, or, as Aristotle put it, "impelled to trace-or account for-phenomena." And in this there was nothing inconsistent; for, though he rejected sense-perception as illusory, yet it had not therefore vanished from the world. Trees still grew green before his eyes, the brook still whispered in his ears, flowers were still fragrant, and fruits still palatable to his taste. And if this held good in his instance, it held good of the rest of mankind, yesterday as today, there as here, whenever and wherever they existed. Nor was he in any wise precluded from transgressing these limits of time and space. He was free to speak of the rise of the human race, the origin of the earth, or the mutations of the universe, for he merely implied that "such-and-such phenomena would have presented themselves to me and to those like me, if we had been alive then and there." Though Kant's "General History and Theory of the Heavens" actually preceded his "Critique of Pure Reason," yet their order might as well have been reversed: the sage of Konigsberg's belief that only the "thing in itself" possessed objective reality need no more have prevented his derivation of the solar system from a primeval nebula than the sage of Elea's ontology need have stood in the way of his cosmogony. This was the point of view which Parmenides maintained in the composition of Part II. of his didactic poem; or rather, he would have maintained it with complete consciousness if the distinctions of "subjective and objective," "absolute and relative," and the like, had been clearly and logically grasped by him, and had been fixed, with their corresponding terminology, as part of the furniture of his mind. But this, as we know, was not the case. His own expressions betray him, chiefly the Greek word doja, which we have to render by "opinion," but which really conveys several finer shades of meaning. It signifies the sense-perception--the thing that appears to men; and it signifies equally the idea, or view, or opinion--the thing that appears to men to be true. Thus Parmenides was precluded, by the habits of thought and speech prevailing in his times, from treating and approaching with any degree of confidence what we designate subjective or relative truth. What he offered were "the Opinions of Mortals;" and this description did not merely cover other people's opinions. It included his own as well, as far as they were not confined to the unassailable ground of an apparent philosophic necessity. He laid them before his reader with the specific warning not to yield them unquestioning credence; he ;spoke of the "misleading structure" of his theory, and called its exposition " plausible" or acceptable in contrast with the "convincing force of truth" which belongs to ideal reason. As he wrote in his dithyrambic introduction, both parts of his didactic poem were put in his mouth by a goddess. The second half contains some of his most original dogmas, which were taken in earnest and widely esteemed in antiquity, and cannot therefore have been intended to act merely as a foil for the brilliance of his "Doctrine of Truth." Doubtless he was also glad of the opportunity of displaying the amount of his learning in this form, for he straightly wrote that the reader of his work would be "second to no mortal in knowledge " or insight. Further, besides satisfying the desire of his own heart, he enjoyed the welcome chance of finding himself in no too great opposition to the religious traditions and sentiment of his age. He adopted the same method in this instance as in that of his doctrine of phenomena, ranging himself, that is to say, with the popular belief modified by Orphic influences, and introducing deities such as the "all-controlling goddess" enthroned in the centre of the universe, and "Eros the first-created." Meantime it is doubtful how far such godheads were mere personifications of natural forces and factors. We shall hardly be wrong if we presume that the mind of the philosophic poet was torn by as deep a misgiving as that which quite recently gave us Fechner's "Day and Night Views" by the side of his "Atomic Theory."

The cosmogony of Parmenides starts from the assumption of two primary matters. They bear a striking resemblance to the first differentiation of the primary Being of Anaximander, with the thin, the bright, and the light on the one side, and the thick, the dark, the heavy on the other. Parmenides conceived the origin of the world as inexplicable, except by the cooperation of both factors, which were sometimes called light and darkness. He explicitly condemns the assumption of a single primary matter and the rejection of the second--a condemnation which was intended to apply to the theories of Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, but which fell chiefly on the last-named of the three, who was the principal opponent of the Eleatic philosopher. In verses which have not come down to us, Parmenides described the creation of "the earth, the sun, the moon with its borrowed light, the common ether, the heavenly milk, the outermost Olympus," already known to us, "and the warm force of the stars." We can credit him with a knowledge of the globular shape of the earth without any hesitation. He is said to have been the first to give literary form to the theory, and to follow the older Pythagoreans in not disputing the central position of the earth-ball in the universe. Moreover, he developed the doctrine of the different zones; and, misled apparently by false analogies drawn from the heavenly zones, which he transferred to the central earth, he consider-ably exaggerated the size of that strip of the earth which is rendered uninhabitable by its heat. The different regions of the heaven were known to him as "wreaths." He represented them as enclosing one another in concentric circles composed partly of "unmixed fire," and partly of fire mixed with the dark or earthy matter. As a natural philosopher he followed both Anaximander and Pythtagoras, and we have already shown cause to believe that he was influenced by the "table of contraries." That influence becomes clearer when we pass to Parmenides' theory of generation. He referred the difference of sex in the embyro to its local position, so that the contrast of male and female corresponded with that of right and left. In the same theory we mark the tendency, so characteristic of a Pythagorean or mathematical training, to derive distinctions of quality from differences of quantity. He followed Alcmaeon in using the hypothetical proportions of the male and female generative elements to account for idiosyncrasies of character, and above all for the peculiar sexual inclinations of the male and female products. In precisely the same way he referred the intellectual differences of individuals and their mental condition with its temporary variations to the greater or smaller share of the two primary matters which their bodies contained. Empedocles, as we shall presently see, repeated this mode of thought, which led him to an important and genuinely

scientific modification of the doctrine of elements. These two philosophers, Parmenides and Empedocles, display other points of contact, to which we shall return later on. At present we have merely to pass in review the younger representatives of the Eleatic school before we say a last a word on the work of Parmenides as a whole.

Gomperz, Theodor. Greek Thinkers: A History of Ancient Philosophy. New York:

Scribner’s, 1901.