Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 3rd ed. Volume 1

Though Xenophanes thus appears (like Pythagoras) mainly as a religious dogmatist, yet theogony and cosmogony were so intimately connected in the sixth century B.C., that he at the same time struck out a new philosophical theory. His negation of theogony was tantamount to a negation of cosmogony. In substituting one God for many, he set aside all distinct agencies in the universe, to recognise only one agent, single, all-pervading, indivisible. He repudiated all genesis of a new reality, all actual existence of parts, succession, change, beginning, end, etc., in reference to the universe, as well as in reference to God. “Wherever I turned my mind (he exclaimed) everything resolved itself into One and the same: all things existing came back always and everywhere into one similar and permanent nature.”52 The fundamental tenet of Xenophanes was partly religious, partly philosophical, Pantheism, or Pankosmism: looking upon the universe as one real all-comprehensive Ens, which he would not call either finite or infinite, either in motion or at rest.53 Non-Ens he pronounced to be an absurdity — an inadmissible and unmeaning phrase.

It was thus from Xenophanes that the doctrine of Pankosmism obtained introduction into Greek philosophy, recognising nothing real except the universe as an indivisible and unchangeable whole. Such a creed was altogether at variance with common perception, which apprehends the universe as a plurality of substances, distinguishable, divisible, changeable, &c. And Xenophanes could not represent his One and All, which excluded all change, to be the substratum out of which phenomenal variety was generated — as Water, Air, the Infinite, had been represented by the Ionic philosophers. The sense of this contradiction, without knowing how to resolve it, appears to have occasioned the mournful complaints of irremediable doubt and uncertainty, preserved as fragments from his poems. “No man (he exclaims) knows clearly about the Gods or the universe: even if he speak what is perfectly true, he himself does not know it to be true: all is matter of opinion.”54

Nevertheless while denying all real variety or division in the universe, Xenophanes did not deny the variety of human perceptions and beliefs. But he allowed them as facts belonging to man, not to the universe — as subjective or relative, not as objective or absolute. He even promulgated opinions of his own respecting many of the physical and cosmological subjects treated by the Ionic philosophers.

Without attempting to define the figure of the Earth, he considered it to be of vast extent and of infinite depth;55 including, in its interior cavities, prodigious reservoirs both of fire and water. He thought that it had at one time been covered with water, in proof of which he noticed the numerous shells found inland and on mountain tops, together with the prints of various fish which he had observed in the quarries of Syracuse, in the island of Paros, and elsewhere. From these facts he inferred that the earth had once been covered with water, and even that it would again be so covered at some future time, to the destruction of animal and human life.56 He supposed that the sun, moon, and stars were condensations of vapours exhaled from the Earth, collected into clouds, and alternately inflamed and extinguished.57

Parmenides, of Elea, followed up and gave celebrity to the Xenophanean hypothesis in a poem, of which the striking exordium is yet preserved. The two veins of thought, which Xenophanes had recognised and lamented his inability to reconcile, were proclaimed by Parmenides as a sort of inherent contradiction in the human mind — Reason or Cogitation declaring one way, Sense (together with the remembrances and comparisons of sense) suggesting a faith altogether opposite. Dropping that controversy with the popular religion which had been raised by Xenophanes, Parmenides spoke of many different Gods or Goddesses, and insisted on the universe as one, without regarding it as one God. He distinguished Truth from matter of Opinion.58 Truth was knowable only by pure mental contemplation or cogitation, the object of which was Ens or Being, the Real or Absolute: here the Cogitans and the Cogitatum were identical, one and the same.59 Parmenides conceived Ens not simply as existent, but as self-existent, without beginning or end,60 as extended, continuous, indivisible, and unchangeable. The Ens Parmenideum comprised the two notions of Extension and Duration:61 it was something Enduring and Extended; Extension including both space, and matter so far forth as filling space. Neither the contrary of Ens (Non-Ens), nor anything intermediate between Ens and Non-Ens, could be conceived, or named, or reasoned about. Ens comprehended all that was Real, without beginning or end, without parts or difference, without motion or change, perfect and uniform like a well-turned sphere.62

In this subject Ens, with its few predicates, chiefly negative, consisted all that Parmenides called Truth. Everything else belonged to the region of Opinion, which embraced all that was phenomenal, relative, and transient: all that involved a reference to man’s senses, apprehension, and appreciation, all the indefinite diversity of observed facts and inferences. Plurality, succession, change, motion, generation, destruction, division of parts, &c., belonged to this category. Parmenides did not deny that he and other men had perceptions and beliefs corresponding to these terms, but he denied their application to the Ens or the self-existent. We are conscious of succession, but the self-existent has no succession: we perceive change of colour and other sensible qualities, and change of place or motion, but Ens neither changes nor moves. We talk of things generated or destroyed — things coming into being or going out of being — but this phrase can have no application to the self-existent Ens, which is always and cannot properly be called either past or future.63 Nothing is really generated or destroyed, but only in appearance to us, or relatively to our apprehension.64 In like manner we perceive plurality of objects, and divide objects into parts. But Ens is essentially One, and cannot be divided.65 Though you may divide a piece of matter you cannot divide the extension of which that matter forms part: you cannot (to use the expression of Hobbes66) pull asunder the first mile from the second, or the first hour from the second.

The milestone, or the striking of the clock, serve as marks to assist you in making a mental division, and in considering or describing one hour and one mile apart from the next. This, however, is your own act, relative to yourself: there is no real division of extension into miles, or of duration into hours. You may consider the same space or time as one or as many, according to your convenience: as one hour or as sixty minutes, as one mile or eight furlongs. But all this is a process of your own mind and thoughts; another man may divide the same total in a way different from you. Your division noway modifies the reality without you, whatever that may be — the Extended and Enduring Ens — which remains still a continuous one, undivided and unchanged.