[27] OVER against that world of flux,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
it is the vocation of Plato to set up a standard of unchangeable
reality, which in its highest theoretic development becomes the world
of "eternal and immutable ideas," indefectible outlines of thought, yet
also the veritable things of experience: the perfect Justice, for
instance, which if even the gods mistake it for perfect Injustice is
not moved out of its place; the Beauty which is the same, yesterday,
to-day and for ever. In such ideas or ideals, "eternal" as
participating in the essential character of the facts they represent to
us, we come in contact, as he supposes, with the insoluble, immovable
granite beneath and amid the wasting torrent of mere phenomena. And in
thus ruling the deliberate aim of his philosophy to be a survey of
things sub specie eternitatis, the reception of a kind of absolute and
independent knowledge [28] (independent, that is, of time and position,
the accidents and peculiar point of view of the receiver) Plato is
consciously under the influence of another great master of the Pre-
Socratic thought, Parmenides, the centre of the School of Elea.
About half a century before the birth of Plato, Socrates being then in
all the impressibility of early manhood, Parmenides, according to the
witness of Plato himself--Parmenides at the age of sixty-five--had
visited Athens at the great festival of the Panathenaea, in company
with Zeno the Eleatic, a characteristic specimen of Greek cleverness,
of the acute understanding, personally very attractive. Though forty
years old, the reputation this Zeno now enjoyed seems to have been very
much the achievement of his youth, and came of a mastery of the sort of
paradox youth always delights in. It may be said that no one has ever
really answered him; the difficulties with which he played so nicely
being really connected with those "antinomies," or contradictions, or
inconsistencies, of our thoughts, which more than two thousand years
afterwards Kant noted as actually inherent in the mind itself--a
certain constitutional weakness or limitation there, in dealing by way
of cold-blooded reflexion with the direct presentations of its
experience. The "Eleatic Palamedes," Plato calls him, "whose
dialectic art causes one and the same thing to appear both like and
[29] unlike, one and many, at rest and in motion." Ah! you hear
already the sort of words that seem sometimes so barren and
unprofitable even in Plato.
It is from extant fragments of a work of his, not a poem, but,
appropriately, To Syngramma,+ The Prose, of Zeno, that such knowledge as
we have of his doctrine, independently of the Parmenides of Plato, is
derived. The active principle of that doctrine then lies in the
acuteness with which he unfolds the contradictions which make against
the very conceivability of the fundamental phenomena of sense, in so
far as those phenomena are supposed to be really existent independently
of ourselves. The truth of experience, of a sensible experience, he
seems to protest:--Why! sensible experience as such is logically
inconceivable. He proved it, or thought, or professed to think, he
proved it, in the phenomenon which covers all the most vivid, the
seemingly irresistible facts, of such experience. Motion was indeed,
as the Heracliteans said, everywhere: was the most incisive of all
facts in the realm of supposed sensible fact. Think of the prow of the
trireme cleaving the water. For a moment Zeno himself might have
seemed but a follower of Heraclitus. He goes beyond him. All is
motion: he admits.--Yes: only, motion is (I can show it!) a nonsensical
term. Follow it, or rather stay by it, and it transforms itself,
agreeably enough for the [30] curious observer, into rest. Motion must
be motion in space, of course; from point to point in it,--and again,
more closely, from point to point within such interval; and so on,
infinitely; 'tis rest there: perpetual motion is perpetual rest:--the
hurricane, the falling tower, the deadly arrow from the bow at whose
coming you shake there so wretchedly, Zeno's own rapid word-fence--all
alike at rest, to the restful eye of the pure reason! The tortoise,
the creature that moves most slowly, cannot be overtaken by Achilles,
the swiftest of us all; or at least you can give no rational
explanation how it comes to be overtaken. Zeno had an armoury of such
enigmas. Can a bushel of corn falling make a noise if a single grain
makes none? Again, that motion should cease, we find inconceivable:
but can you conceive how it should so much as begin? at what point
precisely, in the moving body? Ubiquitous, tyrannous, irresistible, as
it may seem, motion, with the whole so dazzling world it covers, is--
nothing!
Himself so striking an instance of mobile humour in his exposure of the
unreality of all movement, Zeno might be taken so far only for a
master, or a slave, of paradox; such paradox indeed as is from the very
first inherent in every philosophy which (like that of Plato himself,
accepting even Zeno as one of its institutors) opposes the seen to the
unseen as [31] falsehood to truth. It was the beginning of
scholasticism; and the philosophic mind will perhaps never be quite in
health, quite sane or natural, again. The objective, unconscious,
pleasantly sensuous mind of the Greek, becoming a man, as he thinks,
and putting away childish thoughts, is come with Zeno one step towards
Aristotle, towards Aquinas, or shall we say into the rude scholasticism
of the pedantic Middle Age? And we must have our regrets. There is
always something lost in growing up.
The wholesome scepticism of Hume or Mill for instance, the scepticism
of the modern world, beset now with insane speculative figments, has
been an appeal from the preconceptions of the understanding to the
authority of the senses. With the Greeks, whose metaphysic business
was then still all to do, the sceptical action of the mind lay rather
in the direction of an appeal from the affirmations of sense to the
authority of newly-awakened reason. Just then all those real and
verbal difficulties which haunt perversely the human mind always, all
those unprofitable queries which hang about the notions of matter and
time and space, their divisibility and the like, seemed to be stirring
together, under the utterance of this brilliant, phenomenally clever,
perhaps insolent, young man, his master's favourite. To the work of
that grave master, nevertheless--of Parmenides--a very different person
certainly from his rattling disciple, Zeno's [32] seemingly so
fantastic doctrine was sincerely in service. By its destructive
criticism, its dissipation of the very conceivability of the central
and most incisive of sensible phenomena, it was a real support to
Parmenides in his assertion of the nullity of all that is but
phenomenal, leaving open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might say)
to that which really is. That which is, so purely, or absolutely, that
it is nothing at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:--Parmenides
and the Eleatic School were much occupied with the determination of the
thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to that.
Motion discredited, motion gone, all was gone that belonged to an
outward and concrete experience, thus securing exclusive validity to
the sort of knowledge, if knowledge it is to be called, which
corresponds to the "Pure Being," that after all is only definable as
"Pure Nothing," that colourless, formless, impalpable existence (ousia
achrômatos, aschêmatistos, anaphês)+ to use the words of Plato, for whom
Parmenides became a sort of inspired voice. Note at times, in reading
him, in the closing pages of the fifth book of The Republic for
instance, the strange accumulation of terms derivative from the
abstract verb "To be." As some more modern metaphysicians have done,
even Plato seems to pack such terms together almost by rote. Certainly
something of paradox may always be felt even in his [33] exposition of
"Being," or perhaps a kind of paralysis of speech--aphasia.+
Parmenides himself had borrowed the thought from another, though he
made it his own. Plato, in The Republic, as a critic of Homer, by way
of fitting Homer the better for the use of the schoolboys of the ideal
city, is ready to sacrifice much of that graceful polytheism in which
the Greeks anticipated the dulia of saints and angels in the catholic
church. He does this to the advantage of a very abstract, and as it
may seem disinterested, certainly an uninteresting, notion of deity,
which is in truth:--well! one of the dry sticks of mere "natural
theology," as it is called. In this he was but following the first,
the original, founder of the Eleatic School, Xenophanes, who in a
somewhat scornful spirit had urged on men's attention that, in their
prayers and sacrifices to the gods, in all their various thoughts and
statements, graceful or hideous, about them, they had only all along
with much fallacy been making gods after their own likeness, as horse
or dog too, if perchance it cast a glance towards heaven, would after
the same manner project thither the likeness of horse or dog: that to
think of deity you must think of it as neither here nor there, then nor
now; you must away with all limitations of time and space and matter,
nay, with the very conditions, the limitation, of thought itself;
apparently not [34] observing that to think of it in this way was in
reality not to think of it at all:--That in short Being so pure as this
is pure Nothing.
In opposition then to the anthropomorphic religious poetry of Homer,
Xenophanes elaborates the notion, or rather the abstract or purely
verbal definition, of that which really is (to on)+ as inconclusive of
all time, and space, and mode; yet so that all which can be identified
concretely with mode and space and time is but antithetic to it, as
finite to infinite, seeming to being, contingent to necessary, the
temporal, in a word, to the eternal. Once for all, in harshest
dualism, the only true yet so barren existence is opposed to the world
of phenomena--of colour and form and sound and imagination and love, of
empirical knowledge. Objects, real objects, as we know, grow in
reality towards us in proportion as we define their various qualities.
And yet, from another point of view, definition, qualification, is a
negative process: it is as if each added quality took from the object
we are defining one or more potential qualities. The more definite
things become as objects of sensible or other empirical apprehension,
the more, it might be said from the logician's point of view, have we
denied about them. It might seem that their increasing reality as
objects of sense was in direct proportion to the increase of their
distance from that perfect Being which is everywhere and at all times
in every possible mode of being. A [35] thing visibly white is found
as one approaches it to be also smooth to the touch; and this added
quality, says the formal logician, does but deprive it of all other
possible modes of texture; Omnis determinatio est negatio.+ Vain
puerilities! you may exclaim:--with justice. Yet such are the
considerations which await the mind that suffers itself to dwell awhile
on the abstract formula to which the "rational theology" of Xenophanes
leads him. It involved the assertion of an absolute difference between
the original and all that is or can be derived from it; that the former
annuls, or is exclusive of, the latter, which has in truth no real or
legitimate standing-ground as matter of knowledge; that, in opposite
yet equally unanswerable senses, at both ends of experience there is--
nothing! Of the most concrete object, as of the most abstract, it
might be said, that it more properly is not than is.
From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek religious
poets, that most abstract and arid of formulae, Pure Being, closed in
indifferently on every side upon itself, and suspended in the midst of
nothing, like a hard transparent crystal ball, as he says; "The
Absolute"; "The One"; passed to his fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking,
doubtless in the true spirit of philosophy, for the centre of the
universe, of his own experience of it, for some common measure of the
experience of all men. To enforce a reasonable unity and order, to
impress some larger likeness of reason, [36] as one knows it in one's
self, upon the chaotic infinitude of the impressions that reach us from
every side, is what all philosophy as such proposes. Kosmos;+ order;
reasonable, delightful, order; is a word that became very dear, as we
know, to the Greek soul, to what was perhaps most essentially Greek in
it, to the Dorian element there. Apollo, the Dorian god, was but its
visible consecration. It was what, under his blessing, art
superinduced upon the rough stone, the yielding clay, the jarring
metallic strings, the common speech of every day. Philosophy, in its
turn, with enlarging purpose, would project a similar light of
intelligence upon the at first sight somewhat unmeaning world we find
actually around us:--project it; or rather discover it, as being really
pre-existent there, if one were happy enough to get one's self into the
right point of view. To certain fortunate minds the efficacious moment
of insight would come, when, with delightful adaptation of means to
ends, of the parts to the whole, the entire scene about one,
bewildering, unsympathetic, unreasonable, on a superficial view, would
put on, for them at least, kosmiotês,+ that so welcome expression of
fitness, which it is the business of the fine arts to convey into
material things, of the art of discipline to enforce upon the lives of
men. The primitive Ionian philosophers had found, or thought they
found, such a principle (archê)+ in the force of some omnipresent
physical element, [37] air, water, fire; or in some common law, motion,
attraction, repulsion; as Plato would find it in an eternally appointed
hierarchy of genus and species; as the science of our day embraces it
(perhaps after all only in fancy) in the expansion of a large body of
observed facts into some all-comprehensive hypothesis, such as
"evolution."
For Parmenides, at his early day, himself, as some remnants of his work
in that direction bear witness, an acute and curious observer of the
concrete and sensible phenomena of nature, that principle of reasonable
unity seemed attainable only by a virtual negation, by the
obliteration, of all such phenomena. When we have learned as exactly
as we can all the curious processes at work in our own bodies or souls,
in the stars, in or under the earth, their very definiteness, their
limitation, will but make them the more antagonistic to that which
alone really is, because it is always and everywhere itself, identical
exclusively with itself. Phenomena!--by the force of such arguments as
Zeno's, the instructed would make a clean sweep of them, for the
establishment, in the resultant void, of the "One," with which it is
impossible (para panta legomena)+ in spite of common language, and of
what seems common sense, for the "Many"--the hills and cities of
Greece, you and me, Parmenides himself, really to co-exist at all.
"Parmenides," says one, "had stumbled upon [38] the modern thesis that
thought and being are the same."
Something like this--this impossibly abstract doctrine--is what Plato's
"father in philosophy" had had to proclaim, in the midst of the busy,
brilliant, already complicated life of the recently founded colonial
town of Elea. It was like the revelation to Israel in the midst of
picturesque idolatries, "The Lord thy God is one Lord";+ only that here
it made no claim to touch the affections, or even to warm the
imagination. Israel's Greek cousin was to undergo a harder, a more
distant and repressive discipline in those matters, to which a
peculiarly austere moral beauty, at once self-reliant and submissive,
the aesthetic expression of which has a peculiar, an irresistible
charm, would in due time correspond.
It was in difficult hexameter verse, in a poem which from himself or
from others had received the title--Peri physeôs+ (De Naturâ Rerum) that
Parmenides set forth his ideas. From the writings of Clement of
Alexandria, and other later writers large in quotation, diligent modern
scholarship has collected fragments of it, which afford sufficient
independent evidence of his manner of thought, and supplement
conveniently Plato's, of course highly subjective, presentment in his
Parmenides of what had so deeply influenced him.-- [39] "Now come!"
(this fragment of Parmenides is in Proclus, who happened to quote it in
commenting on the Timaeus of Plato) "Come! do you listen, and take
home what I shall tell you: what are the two paths of search after
right understanding. The one,
hê men hopôs estin te kai hôs ouk esti mê einai?+
"that what is, is; and that what is not, is not"; or, in the Latin of
scholasticism, here inaugurated by Parmenides, esse ens: non esse non
ens--
peithous esti keleuthos; alêtheiê gar opêdei?+
"this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes along with it. The
other--that what is, is not; and by consequence that what is not, is:--
I tell you that is the way which goes counter to persuasion:
tên dê toi phrazô panapeithea emmen atarpon? oute gar an gnoiês
to ge mê eon ou gar ephikton?+
That which is not, never could you know: there is no way of getting at
that; nor could you explain it to another; for Thought and Being are
identical."--Famous utterance, yet of so dubious omen!--To gar auto
voein estin te kai einai +---idem est enim cogitare et esse. "It is one
to me," he proceeds, "at what point I begin; for thither I shall come
back over again: tothi gar palin hixomai authis."+
Yes, truly! again and again, in an empty circle, we may say; and
certainly, with those [40] dry and difficult words in our ears, may
think for a moment that philosophic reflexion has already done that
delightfully superficial Greek world an ill turn, troubling so early
its ingenuous soul; that the European mind, as was said, will never be
quite sane again. It has been put on a quest (vain quest it may prove
to be) after a kind of knowledge perhaps not properly attainable.
Hereafter, in every age, some will be found to start afresh
quixotically, through what wastes of words! in search of that true
Substance, the One, the Absolute, which to the majority of acute people
is after all but zero, and a mere algebraic symbol for nothingness. In
themselves, by the way, such search may bring out fine intellectual
qualities; and thus, in turn, be of service to those who can profit by
the spectacle of an enthusiasm not meant for them; must nevertheless be
admitted to have had all along something of disease about it; as indeed
to Plato himself the philosophic instinct as such is a form of "mania."
An infectious mania, it might seem,--that strange passion for
nonentity, to which the Greek was so oddly liable, to which the human
mind generally might be thought to have been constitutionally
predisposed; for the doctrine of "The One" had come to the surface
before in old Indian dreams of self-annihilation, which had been
revived, in the second century after Christ, in the ecstasies
(ecstasies of the pure [41] spirit, leaving the body behind it)
recommended by the Neo-Platonists; and again, in the Middle Age, as a
finer shade of Christian experience, in the mystic doctrines of Eckhart
and Tauler concerning that union with God which can only be attained by
the literal negation of self, by a kind of moral suicide; of which
something also may be found, under the cowl of the monk, in the clear,
cold, inaccessible, impossible heights of the book of the Imitation.
It presents itself once more, now altogether beyond Christian
influence, in the hard and ambitious intellectualism of Spinoza; a
doctrine of pure repellent substance--substance "in vacuo," to be lost
in which, however, would be the proper consummation of the transitory
individual life. Spinoza's own absolutely colourless existence was a
practical comment upon it. Descartes; Malebranche, under the monk's
cowl again; Leibnitz; Berkeley with his theory of the "Vision of all
things in God"; do but present variations on the same theme through the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By one and all it is assumed, in
the words of Plato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable is the
note of the superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing
steadily, as one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite
attainable) condition of either, which in truth can only be attained by
the suppression of all the rule and outline of one's own actual
experience and thought.
[42] Something like that certainly there had been already in the
doctrine of Parmenides, to whom Plato was so willing to go to school.
And in the nineteenth century, as on the one hand the philosophy of
motion, of the "perpetual flux," receives its share of verification
from that theory of development with which in various forms all modern
science is prepossessed; so, on the other hand, the philosophy of rest
also, of the perpetual lethargy, the Parmenidean assertion of the
exclusive reign of "The One," receives an unlooked-for testimony from
the modern physical philosopher, hinting that the phenomena he deals
with--matter, organism, consciousness--began in a state of
indeterminate, abstract indifference, with a single uneasy start in a
sort of eternal sleep, a ripple on the dead, level surface. Increasing
indeed for a while in radius and depth, under the force of mechanic
law, the world of motion and life is however destined, by force of its
own friction, to be restored sooner or later to equilibrium; nay, is
already gone back some noticeable degrees (how desirably!) to the
primeval indifference, as may be understood by those who can reckon the
time it will take for our worn-out planet, surviving all the fret of
the humanity it housed for a while, to be drawn into the sun.
But it is of Plato after all we should be thinking; of the
comparatively temperate thoughts, the axiomata media, he was able to
derive, by a [43] sort of compromise, from the impossible paradox of
his ancient master. What was it, among things inevitably manifest on
his pages as we read him, that Plato borrowed and kept from the Eleatic
School!
Two essential judgments of his philosophy: The opposition of what is,
to what appears; and the parallel opposition of knowledge to opinion;
(heteron epistêmês doxa; eph' heterô ara heteron ti dynamenê hekatera
autôn pephyke? ouk enchôrei gnôston kai doxaston tauton einai?)+ and
thirdly, to illustrate that opposition, the figurative use, so
impressed on thought and speech by Plato that it has come to seem
hardly a figure of speech at all but appropriate philosophic language,
of the opposition of light to darkness.--
Well, then (Socrates is made to say in the fifth book of The
Republic) if what is, is the object of knowledge, would not
something other than what is, be the object of opinion?
Yes! something else.
Does opinion then opine what is not; or is it impossible to have
even opinion concerning what is not? Consider! does not he who
has opinion direct his opinion upon something? or is it
impossible, again, to have an opinion, yet an opinion about
nothing?
Impossible!
But he who has an opinion has opinion at least about something;
hasn't he? Yet after all what is not, is not a thing; but would
most properly be denominated nothing.
Certainly.
Now to what is not, we assigned of necessity ignorance: to what
is, knowledge.
Rightly: he said.
[44] Neither what is, then, nor what is not, is the object of
opinion.
No!
Opinion therefore would be neither ignorance nor knowledge.
It seems not.
Is it, then, beyond these; going beyond knowledge in clearness,
beyond ignorance in obscurity?
Neither the one, nor the other.
But, I asked, opinion seems to you (doesn't it?) to be a darker
thing than knowledge, yet lighter than ignorance.
Very much so; he answered.
Does it lie within those two?
Yes.
Opinion, then, would be midway, between these two conditions?
Undoubtedly so.
Now didn't we say in what went before that if anything became
apparent such that it is, and is not, at the same time, a thing
of that kind would lie between that which is in unmixed clearness,
and that which wholly is not; and that there would be, in regard
to that, neither knowledge nor ignorance; but, again, a condition
revealing itself between ignorance and knowledge?
Rightly.
And now, between these two, what we call 'opinion' has in fact
revealed itself.
Clearly so.
It would remain for us therefore, as it seems, to find that which
partakes of both--both of Being and Not-being, and which could
rightly be called by neither term distinctly; in order that, if it
appear, we may in justice determine it to be the object of opinion;
assigning the extremes to the extremes, the intermediate to what
comes between them.
Or is it not thus?
Thus it is.
These points then being assumed, let him tell me! let him speak
and give his answer--that excellent person, who on the one hand
thinks there is no Beauty itself, nor any idea of Beauty itself,
ever in the same condition in regard to the same things (aei kata
tauta hôsautôs echousan)+ yet, on the other hand, holds [45] that
there are the many beautiful objects:--that lover of sight (ho
philotheamôn)+ who can by no means bear it if any one says that
the beautiful is one; the just also; and the rest, after the same
way. For good Sir! we shall say, pray tell us, is there any one
of these many beautiful things which will not appear ugly (under
certain conditions) of the many just or pious actions which will
not seem unjust or impious?
No! he answered. Rather it must be that they shall seem, in a
manner, both beautiful and ugly; and all the rest you ask of.
Well! The many double things:--Do they seem to be at all less
half than double?
Not at all.
And great, in truth, and little, and light, and heavy--will they
at all more truly be called by these names which we may give them,
than by the opposite names?
No! he said; but each of them will always hold of both.
Every several instance of 'The Many,' then--is it, more truly
than it is not, that which one may affirm it to be?
It is like people at supper-parties he said (very Attic supper-
parties!) playing on words, and the children's riddle about the
eunuch and his fling round the bat--with what, and on what, the
riddle says he hit it; for these things also seem to set both
ways, and it is not possible, fixedly, to conceive any one of
them either to be, or not to be; neither both, nor the one, nor
the other.
Have you anything then you can do with them; or anywhere you can
place them with fairer effect than in that position between being
and the being not? For presumably they will not appear more
obscure than what is not, so as not to be, still more; nor more
luminous than what is, so as to be, even more than that. We have
found then that the many customary notions of the many, about
Beauty and the rest are revolved somewhere between not-being and
being unmixedly.
So we have.
And agreed, at least, at the outset, that if anything of this sort
presented itself, it must be declared matter not of knowledge, but
of opinion; to be apprehended by the intermediate faculty; as it
wanders unfixed, there, between. Republic, 478.
[46] Many a train of thought, many a turn of expression, only too
familiar, some may think, to the reader of Plato, are summarised in
that troublesome yet perhaps attractive passage. The influence then of
Parmenides on Plato had made him, incurably (shall we say?) a dualist.
Only, practically, Plato's richly coloured genius will find a
compromise between the One which alone really is, is yet so empty a
thought for finite minds; and the Many, which most properly is not, yet
presses so closely on eye and ear and heart and fancy and will, at
every moment. That which really is (to on)+ the One, if he is really to
think about it at all, must admit within it a certain variety of
members; and, in effect, for Plato the true Being, the Absolute, the
One, does become delightfully multiple, as the world of ideas--
appreciable, through years of loving study, more and more clearly, one
by one, as the perfectly concrete, mutually adjusted, permanent forms
of our veritable experience: the Bravery, for instance, that cannot be
confused, not merely with Cowardice, but with Wisdom, or Humility. One
after another they emerge again from the dead level, the Parmenidean
tabula rasa, with nothing less than the reality of persons face to face
with us, of a personal identity. It was as if the firm plastic
outlines of the delightful old Greek polytheism had found their way
back after all into a repellent monotheism. Prefer as he may in theory
that [47] blank white light of the One--its sterile, "formless,
colourless, impalpable," eternal identity with itself--the world, and
this chiefly is why the world has not forgotten him, will be for him,
as he is by no means colour-blind, by no means a colourless place. He
will suffer it to come to him, as his pages convey it in turn to us,
with the liveliest variety of hue, as in that conspicuously visual
emblem of it, the outline of which (essentially characteristic of
himself as it seems) he had really borrowed from the old Eleatic
teacher who had tried so hard to close the bodily eye that he might the
better apprehend the world unseen.--
And now (he writes in the seventh book of The Republic) take
for a figure of human nature, as regards education and the lack
thereof, some such condition as this. Think you see people as
it were in some abode below-ground, like a cave, having its
entrance spread out upwards towards the light, broad, across the
whole cavern. Suppose them here from childhood; their legs and
necks chained; so that there they stay, and can see only what is
in front of them, being unable by reason of the chain to move
their heads round about: and the light of a fire upon them,
blazing from far above, behind their backs: between the fire and
the prisoners away up aloft: and see beside it a low wall built
along, as with the showmen, in front of the people lie the screens
above which they exhibit their wonders.
I see: he said.
See, then, along this low wall, men, bearing vessels of all sorts
wrought in stone and wood; and, naturally, some of the bearers
talking, other silent.
It is a strange figure you describe: said he: and strange
prisoners.--
They are like ourselves: I answered! Republic, 514.
[48] Metaphysical formulae have always their practical equivalents.
The ethical alliance of Heraclitus is with the Sophists, and the
Cyrenaics or the Epicureans; that of Parmenides, with Socrates, and the
Cynics or the Stoics. The Cynic or Stoic ideal of a static calm is as
truly the moral or practical equivalent of the Parmenidean doctrine of
the One, as the Cyrenaic monochronos hêdonê+--the pleasure of the ideal
now--is the practical equivalent of the doctrine of motion; and, as
sometimes happens, what seems hopelessly perverse as a metaphysic for
the understanding is found to be realisable enough as one of many
phases of our so flexible human feeling. The abstract philosophy of
the One might seem indeed to have been translated into the terms of a
human will in the rigid, disinterested, renunciant career of the
emperor Marcus Aurelius, its mortal coldness. Let me however conclude
with a document of the Eleatic temper, nearer in its origin to the age
of Plato: an ancient fragment of Cleanthes the Stoic, which has justly
stirred the admiration of Stoical minds; though truly, so hard is it
not to lapse from those austere heights, the One, the Absolute, has
become in it after all, with much varied colour and detail in his
relations to concrete things and persons, our father Zeus.
An illustrious athlete; then a mendicant dealer in water-melons; chief
pontiff lastly of the sect of the Stoics; Cleanthes, as we see him in
anecdote [49] at least, is always a loyal, sometimes a very quaintly
loyal, follower of the Parmenidean or Stoic doctrine of detachment from
all material things. It was at the most critical points perhaps of
such detachment, that somewhere about the year three hundred before
Christ, he put together the verses of his famous "Hymn." By its
practical indifference, its resignation, its passive submission to the
One, the undivided Intelligence, which dia pantôn phoita+--goes to and
fro through all things, the Stoic pontiff is true to the Parmenidean
schooling of his flock; yet departs from it also in a measure by a
certain expansion of phrase, inevitable, it may be, if one has to speak
at all about that chilly abstraction, still more make a hymn to it. He
is far from the cold precept of Spinoza, that great re-assertor of the
Parmenidean tradition: That whoso loves God truly must not expect to be
loved by Him in return. In truth, there are echoes here from many
various sources. Ek sou gar genos esmen+:--that is quoted, as you
remember, by Saint Paul, so just after all to the pagan world, as its
testimony to some deeper Gnôsis than its own. Certainly Cleanthes has
conceived his abstract monotheism a little more winningly, somewhat
better, than dry, pedantic Xenophanes; perhaps because Socrates and
Plato have lived meanwhile. You might even fancy what he says an echo
from Israel's devout response to the announcement: "The Lord thy God is
one Lord." The Greek [50] certainly is come very near to his unknown
cousin at Sion in what follows:--
kydist', athanatôn, polyônyme, pankrates aiei
Zeu, physeos archêge, nomou meta panta kybernôn,
chaire· se gar pantessi themis thnêtoisi prosaudan, k.t.l.
Mullach, Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, I. p. 151.
Thou O Zeus art praised above all gods: many are Thy names and
Thine is all power for ever.
The beginning of the world was from Thee: and with law Thou
rulest over all things.
Unto Thee may all flesh speak: for we are Thy offspring.
Therefore will I raise a hymn unto Thee: and will ever sing of
Thy power.
The whole order of the heavens obeyeth Thy word: as it moveth
around the earth:
With little and great lights mixed together: how great art Thou,
King above all for ever!
Nor is anything done upon earth apart from Thee: nor in the
firmament, nor in the seas:
Save that which the wicked do: by their own folly.
But Thine is the skill to set even the crooked straight: what is
without fashion is fashioned and the alien akin before Thee.
Thus hast Thou fitted together all things in one: the good with
the evil:
That Thy word should be one in all things: abiding for ever.
Let folly be dispersed from our souls: that we may repay Thee
the honour, wherewith Thou hast honoured us:
Singing praise of Thy works for ever: as becometh the sons of
men.+
NOTES
29. +Transliteration: To Syngramma. Translation: "The Prose."
32. +Transliteration: ousia achrômatos, aschêmatistos, anaphês. E-text
editor's translation: "the colorless, utterly formless, intangible
essence." Plato, Phaedrus 247c. See also Appreciations, "Coleridge,"
where Pater uses the same quotation.
33. +Transliteration: aphasia. Liddell and Scott definition:
"speechlessness."
34. +Transliteration: to on. Translation: "that which is."
35. +The principle is that of Baruch Spinoza.
36. +Transliteration: Kosmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1.
order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order:
of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an
ornament...; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement."
36. +Transliteration: kosmiotês. Liddell and Scott definition:
"propriety, decorum, orderly behaviour."
36. +Transliteration: archê. Liddell and Scott definition: "I.
beginning, first cause, origin. II. 1. supreme power, sovereignty,
dominion; 2. office."
37. +Transliteration: para panta legomena. Pater's translation: "in
spite of common language."
38. "The Lord thy God. . . ." Deuteronomy 6:4. "Hear, O Israel: The
LORD our God is one LORD: . . ." See also Mark 12:29: "And Jesus
answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The
Lord our God is one Lord: . . ."
38. +Transliteration: Peri physeôs. E-text editor's translation:
"Regarding Nature--i.e. the title De Naturâ Rerum."
39. +Transliteration: hê men hopôs estin te kai hôs ouk esti mê einai.
Pater's translation: "that what is, is; and that what is not, is not."
Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana [Fragmentary Song or Poem], line 35.
Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 117. Ed. F.W.A. Mullach.
Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of the Paris, 1860
edition).
39. +Transliteration: peithous esti keleuthos; alêtheiê gar opêdei.
Pater's translation: "this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes
along with it." Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana [Fragmentary Song or Poem],
line 36. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118. Although I
have left the quotation as Pater renders it, the semicolon should be a
comma, as in the Mullach collection Pater used--otherwise the first
half of the sentence would be a question, and that is not how Pater
himself translates the verse.
39. +Transliteration: tên dê toi phrazô panapeithea emmen atarpon; oute
gar an gnoiês to ge mê eon ou gar ephikton. Pater's translation: "I
tell you that is the way which goes counter to persuasion: That which
is not, never could you know: there is no way of getting at that."
Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana, lines 38-9. Fragmenta Philosophorum
Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.
39. +Transliteration: To gar auto voein estin te kai einai. Pater's
translation in Latin: "idem est enim cogitare et esse"; in English,
that may be translated, "Thinking and being are identical."
Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana, line 40. Fragmenta Philosophorum
Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.
39. +Transliteration: tothi gar palin hixomai authis. Pater's
translation: "at what point I begin; for thither I shall come back over
again." Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana, line 42. Fragmenta Philosophorum
Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.
43. +Transliteration: heteron epistêmês doxa; eph' heterô ara heteron ti
dynamenê hekatera autôn pephyke; ouk enchôrei gnôston kai doxaston
tauton einai. E-text editor's translation: "opinion differs from
scientific knowledge...To each of them belongs a different power, so to
each falls a different sphere...it is not possible for knowledge and
opinion to be one and the same." Plato, Republic, 478a-b.
44. +Transliteration: aei kata tauta hôsautôs echousan. Pater's
translation: "ever in the same condition in regard to the same things."
Plato, Republic 478.
45. +Transliteration: ho philotheamôn. Liddell and Scott definition
"fond of seeing, fond of spectacles or shows." This word is from the
same passage just cited, note for page 44.
46. +Transliteration: to on. Translation: "that which is."
48. Transliteration: monochronos hêdonê. Pater's definition "the
pleasure of the ideal now." The adjective monochronos means,
literally, "single or unitary time." See also Marius the Epicurean,
Vol. 1, Cyrenaicism, and Vol. 2, Second Thoughts, where Pater quotes
the same key Cyrenaic language.
49. +Transliteration: dia pantôn phoita. E-text editor's translation:
"which courses through all things." Cleanthes (300-220 B.C.), Hymn to
Zeus, lines 12-13. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 151.
Ed. F.W.A. Mullach. Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of
the Paris, 1860 edition). Pater has translated Cleanthes' phrase
koinos logos as "undivided Intelligence." The relevant verse reads,
"su kateuthynês koinon logon, hos dia pantôn phoita," which may be
translated, "You guide the Universal Thought that courses through all
things." But the word logos is multivalent and subject to
philosophical nuance, so any translation of it is bound to be limited.
49. +Transliteration: Ek sou gar genos esmen. E-text editor's
translation: "For we are born of you." Cleanthes (300-220 B.C.), Hymn
to Zeus, line 4. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 151.
Pater alludes also to Saint Paul's words in Acts 17:28: "For in him we
live, and move, and have our being."
50. +Here Pater provides a somewhat abbreviated translation of the Hymn
to Zeus. As above, the Greek is from Fragmenta Philosophorum
Graecorum, Vol. 1, 151.