_PARMENIDES._
Greek Philosophical Poetry.--The Emergence of
Philosophy from Mythology.--The Ionian Sages.--The
Pythagoreans.--Anaxagoras.--Democritus.--The
Eleatics.--Heraclitus.--Xenophanes of Colophon.--His
Critique of the Myths.--Assertion of Monotheism.--Fragments
of his Poem on Nature.--Parmenides of Elea.--His Political
Importance.--Parmenides in the Dialogues of Plato.--His
Metaphysic of Being.--His Natural Philosophy.--The Logic
Deduced from him by Zeno and Melissus.--Translation of
the Fragments of his Poem.--The Dualism of Truth and
Opinion.--Impossibility of Obtaining Absolute Knowledge.
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 #epê#, 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 #archai#,
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, #to apeiron#, 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 #apeiron# 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, #poiêtikôterois onomasin#. 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 #Nous#.
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 #esti#, 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, #panta rhei#. 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]
"One god there is, among gods and men the greatest, neither in
body like to mortals, nor in mind.
"With the whole of him he sees, with the whole of him he
thinks, with the whole of him he hears.
"Without exertion, by energy of mind he sways the universe of
things.
"That he abides forever in the same state, without movement, or
change from place to place, is evident.
"But mortals fancy that gods come into being like themselves,
and have their senses, voice, and body. But, of a truth, if
oxen or lions had hands, and could draw with their hands, and
make what men make, then horses like unto horses, and oxen like
unto oxen, would both paint the images of gods, and shape their
bodies also after the similitude of their own limbs.
"Homer and Hesiod attributed to gods everything that is
disgraceful and blameworthy among men, and very many lawless
deeds of gods they recorded--theft, adultery, and mutual
deceit."
Another set of scattered fragments, small in number and meagre in their
information, from the poem by Xenophanes on #physis#, 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:
"For all of us from earth and water sprang.
"Earth and water are all things that come into being and have
birth.
"The spring of water is the sea.
"This upper surface of the earth beneath our feet is open to
the sight, and borders on the air; but the lower parts reach
down into infinity.
"What we call Iris, that also is a cloud, purple-dark,
scarlet-bright, yellow-pale to look upon.
"The very truth itself no man who hath been or will be can know
concerning gods and all whereof I speak; for though he publish
the most absolute, yet even so he does not know: opinion is
supreme o'er all things.
"These things are matters of opinion, shadows of the truth.
"Not from the beginning did gods reveal all things to mortals;
but in course of time by seeking they make progress in
discovery."
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]
"He told us that Pythodorus had described to him the appearance
of Parmenides and Zeno; they came to Athens, he said, at
the great Panathenæa; the former was, at the time of his
visit, about sixty-five years old, very white with age, but
well-favored. Zeno was nearly forty years of age, of a noble
figure and fair aspect; and in the days of his youth he was
reported to have been beloved of Parmenides. He said that they
lodged with Pythodorus in the Ceramicus, outside the wall,
whither Socrates and others came to see them; they wanted to
hear some writings of Zeno, which had been brought to Athens
by them for the first time. He said that Socrates was then
very young, and that Zeno read them to him in the absence of
Parmenides, and had nearly finished when Pythodorus entered,
and with him Parmenides and Aristoteles, who was afterwards one
of the Thirty; there was not much more to hear, and Pythodorus
had heard Zeno repeat them before."
The _Theætetus_ contains another allusion to Parmenides, which proves
in what reverence the old philosopher was held by Socrates:
"My reason is that I have a kind of reverence, not so much for
Melissus and the others, who say that 'all is one and at rest,'
as for the great leader himself, Parmenides, venerable and
awful, as in Homeric language he may be called--him I should be
ashamed to approach in a spirit unworthy of him. I met him when
he was an old man and I was a mere youth, and he appeared to me
to have a glorious depth of mind. And I am afraid that we may
not understand his language, and may fall short even more of
his meaning."
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;
#hen ta panta# 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 #archê# 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 #esti#. 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; #ouk esti#. 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 #archê#, 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, #ta pros alêtheian#, and the doctrine of Appearance,
#ta pros doxan#, was beyond his power. It was what Plato afterwards
attempted in his theory of ideas, and Aristotle in the theory of
forms and matter, #eidê# and #hylê#. 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
#esti#, 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:
"The steeds which bear me, and have brought me to the bounds of
my desire, since they drew and carried me into the way renowned
of her who leads the wise man to all knowledge--on that road I
journeyed, on that road they bore me, those steeds of thought
that whirl the car along. But maidens showed the way, sun-born
maids, who left the halls of gloom and brought us to the light,
withdrawing with their fingers from their brows the veils. And
the axle in the socket made a whistling sound, glowing as by
two round wheels on either side it ran, while the steeds drove
the car swiftly on. There are the gates which open on the paths
of Night and Day. A lintel shuts them in above, and a floor of
stone beneath; but the airy space they close is fastened with
huge doors, which Justice the avenger locks or unlocks by the
key she holds. Her did the maidens sue with gentle words, and
wisely won her to draw for them the bolted barrier from the
gates. The gates flew open, and the doors yawned wide, back
rolling in the sockets their brazen hinges wrought with clasps
and nails. Straight through the portal drove the maidens car
and horses on the broad highway. And me the goddess graciously
received; she took my right hand in her hand, and spoke these
words, addressing me: 'Child of man, companion of immortal
charioteers, that comest drawn by horses to our home, welcome!
for thee no evil fate sent forth to travel on this path--far
from the track of men indeed it lies--but Right and Justice
were thy guides. Thy lot it is all things to learn; both the
sure heart of truth that wins assent, and the vain fancies of
mortals which have no real ground of faith. Yet these, too,
shalt thou learn, since it behooves thee to know all opinions,
testing them, and travelling every field of thought.'"
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.
"Come now, for I will tell, and do thou hear and keep my words,
what are the only ways of inquiry that lead to knowledge. The
one which certifies that being is, and that not-being is not,
is the pathway of persuasion, for truth follows it. The other,
which declares that being is not, and that not-being must be,
that I affirm is wholly unpersuasive; for neither couldst thou
know not-being, since it cannot be got at, nor couldst thou
utter it in words, seeing that thought and being are the same.
"To me it is indifferent where I begin, for again to the same
point I shall return. It must be that speech and thought are
being, for being is, and that not-being is nothing: which
things I bid thee ponder. First, keep thy mind from that path
of inquiry, then, too, from that on which mortals who know
nothing wander in doubt; helplessness sways in their breasts
the erring mind; hither and thither are they borne, deaf, yea,
and blind, in wonderment, confused crowds who fancy being and
not-being are the same and not the same; the way of all of them
leads backwards."
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.
"Never do thou learn to fancy that things that are not,
are; but keep thy mind from this path of inquiry; nor let
custom force thee to pursue that beaten way, to use blind
eyes and sounding ear and tongue, but judge by reason the
knotty argument which I declare. One only way of reasoning
is left--that being is. Wherein are many signs that it is
uncreate and indestructible, whole in itself, unique in kind,
immovable and everlasting. It never was, nor will be, since
it exists as a simultaneous present, a continuous unity. What
origin shall we seek of it? Where and how did it grow? That it
arose from not-being I will not suffer thee to say or think,
for it cannot be thought or said that being is not. Then, too,
what necessity could have forced it to the birth at an earlier
or later moment? for neither birth nor beginning belongs to
being. Wherefore either to be or not to be is the unconditioned
alternative. Nor will the might of proof allow us to believe
that anything can spring from being but itself. Therefore
the law of truth permits no birth or dissolution in it, no
remission of its chains, but holds it firm. This, then, is the
point for decision: it is, or it is not. Now we have settled,
as necessity obliged, to leave the one path, inconceivable,
unnamed, for it is not the true way; but to affirm, as sure,
that being is. How then could being have a future or a past?
If it began to be, or if it is going to be, then it is not:
wherefore birth and death are alike put aside as inconceivable.
Nor is it divisible, since it is all homogeneous, in no part
more itself than in another, which would prevent its coherence,
nor in any part less; but all is full of being. Wherefore it
is one continuous whole, for being draws to being. Immovable
within the bounds of its great chains it is, without beginning,
without end, since birth and dissolution have moved far away,
whom certainty repelled. Eternally the same, in the same state,
for and by itself, it abides; thus fixed and firm it stays, for
strong necessity holds it in the chains of limit and clinches
it around. Wherefore being cannot be infinite, seeing it lacks
nothing; and if it were, it would lack all.
"Look now at things which, though absent, are present to the
mind. For never shall being from being be sundered so as to
lose its continuity by dispersion or recombination.
"Thought and the object of thought are the same, for without
being, in which is affirmation, thou wilt not find thought. For
nothing is or will be besides being, since fate hath bound it
to remain alone and unmoved, which is named the universe--all
things that mortal men held fixed, believing in their
truth--birth and death, to be and not to be, change of place,
and variety of color.
"Now since the extreme limit of being is defined, the whole is
like a well-rounded sphere, of equal radius in all directions,
for it may not be less or greater in one part or another.
For neither is there not-being to prevent its attaining to
equality, nor is it possible that being should in one place be
more and in another less than being, since all is inviolably
one. For this is certain, that it abides, an equal whole all
round, within its limits.
"Here, then, I conclude my true discourse and meditation upon
Truth. Turn now and learn the opinions of men listening to the
deceptive order of my words."
The divine Sophia calls the speech which she is about to utter
deceptive (#apatêlon#), 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:
"Two forms have they determined by their minds to name, for
those are wrong who take but one of these. Corporeally and by
signs they have distinguished them, setting on the one side
fire, ethereal, gentle, very subtle, everywhere identical, but
different from the other element. That, too, is self-identical,
diverse from fire, dark night, a thick and weighty body.
Of these I will reveal to you the whole disposition, as it
appears, so that no thought of mortals may ever elude you.
"Now, seeing that all things are called by the name of light
and night, and the qualities that severally pertain to them,
the universe is full of light and murky night, rivals equally
balanced, since neither partakes of the other.
"For the narrower spheres have been fashioned of impure fire;
those next of night, interpenetrated by a portion of flame;
and in the midst of all is the goddess who controls the whole.
For everywhere she is the cause of dire parturition and
procreation, making female mix with male, and male with female."
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."
"Love, first of all the gods, she formed."
"Thou, too, shalt know the nature of ether, and in ether all
the signs, and the hidden acts of the bright sun's pure lamp,
and whence they sprang; and thou shalt learn the revolutions
of the round-eyed moon, and whence she is; and thou shalt
understand the all-surrounding heaven, whence it arose, and how
fate ruling it bound it to keep the limits of the stars.
"How earth and sun and moon and ether shared by all, and the
galaxy and farthest Olympus, and the hot might of stars sprang
into being.
"Another light that shines in revolution round the earth by
night.
"Forever gazing at the radiant sun.
"For as the elements are mixed in the jointed framework of our
limbs, so are the minds of men made up. For the nature of the
members is the same as that which thinks in the case of all and
each; it is mind that rules.
"From the right side boys, from the left girls.
"Thus, according to opinion, were born and now are these
things; and afterwards, when they have grown to the full, will
perish: whereto men have affixed unto each a name."
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 #ta pros alêtheian# and #ta pros doxan#, 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 #doxai#; and the epigram
pointed by Parmenides against the common folk is equally applicable to
his own sect--
#Kôphoi homôs typhloi te, tethêpotes, akrita phyla.#
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 #kosmos noêtos#, 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:
I heard what was said of the universe,
Heard it and heard it of several thousand years:
It is middling well as far as it goes,--But is that all?
FOOTNOTES:
[44] In my translations of the fragments of Xenophanes and Parmenides,
I have followed the text of their most recent editor, W. A. Mullach,
not without reference, however, to that of Karsten, some of whose
emendations seem almost necessary to the sense. The meaning of
many Parmenidean sentences may, however, be fairly said to be now
irrecoverable, owing to the uncertainty of readings and the lack of
context.
[45] This and the two following translations from Plato are Professor
Jewett's.
[46] See the treatise _De Xenophane, Zenone, et Gorgia_.