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

The Ens of Parmenides thus coincided mainly with that which (since Kant) has been called the Noumenon — the Thing in itself — the Absolute; or rather with that which, by a frequent illusion, passes for the absolute — no notice being taken of the cogitant and believing apart from mind, as if cogitation and belief, cogitata and credita, would be had without it. By Ens was understood the remnant in his mind, after leaving out all that abstraction, as far as it had then been carried, could leave out. It was the minimum indispensable to the continuance of thought; you cannot think (Parmenides says) without thinking of Something, and that Something Extended and Enduring. Though he and others talk of this Something as an Absolute (i.e. apart from or independent of his own thinking mind), yet he also uses some juster language (τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἔστιν τε καὶ εἶναι), showing that it is really relative: that if the Cogitans implies a Cogitatum, the Cogitatum also implies no less its correlative Cogitans: and that though we may divide the two in words, we cannot divide them in fact. It is to be remarked that Parmenides distinguishes the Enduring or Continuous from the Transient or Successive, Duration from Succession (both of which are included in the meaning of the word Time), and that he considers Duration alone as belonging to Ens or the Absolute — to the region of Truth — setting it in opposition or antithesis to Succession, which he treats as relative and phenomenal.

We have thus (with the Eleates) the first appearance of Ontology, the science of Being or Ens, in Grecian philosophy. Ens is everything, and everything is Ens. In the view of Parmenides, Ontology is not merely narrow, but incapable of enlargement or application; we shall find Plato and others trying to expand it into numerous imposing generalities.67

Apart from Ontology, Parmenides reckons all as belonging to human opinions. These were derived from the observations of sense (which he especially excludes from Ontology) with the comparisons, inferences, hypothesis, &c., founded thereupon: the phenomena of Nature generally.68 He does not attempt (as Plato and Aristotle do after him) to make Ontology serve as a principle or beginning for anything beyond itself,69 or as a premiss from which the knowledge of nature is to be deduced. He treats the two — Ontology and Phenomenology, to employ an Hegelian word — as radically disparate, and incapable of any legitimate union. Ens was essentially one and enduring: Nature was essentially multiform, successive, ever changing and moving relative to the observer, and different to observers at different times and places. Parmenides approached the study of Nature from its own starting point, the same as had been adopted by the Ionic philosophers — the data of sense, or certain agencies selected among them, and vaguely applied to explain the rest. Here he felt that he relinquished the full conviction, inseparable from his intellectual consciousness, with which he announced his few absolute truths respecting Ens and Non-Ens, and that he entered upon a process of mingled observation and conjecture, where there was great room for diversity of views between man and man.

Yet though thus passing from Truth to Opinions, from full certainty to comparative and irremediable uncertainty,70 Parmenides does not consider all opinions as equally true or equally untrue. He announces an opinion of his own — what he thinks most probable or least improbable — respecting the structure and constitution of the Kosmos, and he announces it without the least reference to his own doctrines about Ens. He promises information respecting Earth, Water, Air, and the heavenly bodies, and how they work, and how they came to be what they are.71 He recognises two elementary principles or beginnings, one contrary to the other, but both of them positive — Light, comprehending the Hot, the Light, and the Rare — Darkness, comprehending the Cold, the Heavy, and the Dense.72 These two elements, each endued with active and vital properties, were brought into junction and commixture by the influence of a Dea Genitalis analogous to Aphroditê,73 with her first-born son Eros, a personage borrowed from the Hesiodic Theogony. From hence sprang the other active forces of nature, personified under various names, and the various concentric circles or spheres of the Kosmos.

Of those spheres, the outer-most was a solid wall of fire — “flammantia mœnia mundi” — next under this the Æther, distributed into several circles of fire unequally bright and pure — then the circle called the Milky Way, which he regarded as composed of light or fire combined with denser materials — then the Sun and Moon, which were condensations of fire from the Milky Way — lastly, the Earth, which he placed in the centre of the Kosmos.74 He is said to have been the first who pronounced the earth to be spherical, and even distributed it into two or five zones.75 He regarded it as immovable, in consequence of its exact position in the centre. He considered the stars to be fed by exhalation from the Earth. Midway between the Earth and the outer flaming circle, he supposed that there dwelt a Goddess — Justice or Necessity — who regulated all the movements of the Kosmos, and maintained harmony between its different parts. He represented the human race as having been brought into existence by the power of the sun,76 and he seems to have gone into some detail respecting animal procreation, especially in reference to the birth of male and female offspring. He supposed that the human mind, as well as the human body, was compounded of a mixture of the two elemental influences, diffused throughout all Nature: that like was perceived and known by like: that thought and sensation were alike dependent upon the body, and upon the proportions of its elemental composition: that a certain limited knowledge was possessed by every object in Nature, animate or inanimate.77

Before we pass from Parmenides to his pupil and successor Zeno, who developed the negative and dialectic side of the Eleatic doctrine, it will be convenient to notice various other theories of the same century: first among them that of Herakleitus, who forms as it were the contrast and antithesis to Xenophanes and Parmenides.

Herakleitus of Ephesus, known throughout antiquity by the denomination of the Obscure, comes certainly after Pythagoras and Xenophanes and apparently before Parmenides. Of the two first he made special mention, in one of the sentences, alike brief and contemptuous which have been preserved from his lost treatise:—“Much learning does not teach reason: otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hekatæus.” In another passage Herakleitus spoke of the “extensive knowledge, cleverness, and wicked arts” of Pythagoras. He declared that Homer as well as Archilochus deserved to be scourged and expelled from the public festivals.78 His thoughts were all embodied in one single treatise, which he is said to have deposited in the temple of the Ephesian Artemis. It was composed in a style most perplexing and difficult to understand, full of metaphor, symbolical illustration, and antithesis: but this very circumstance imparted to it an air of poetical impressiveness and oracular profundity.79 It exercised a powerful influence on the speculative minds of Greece, both in the Platonic age, and subsequently: the Stoics especially both commented on it largely (though with many dissentient opinions among the commentators), and borrowed with partial modifications much of its doctrine.80

The expositors followed by Lucretius and Cicero conceived Herakleitus as having proclaimed Fire to be the universal and all-pervading element of nature;81 as Thales had recognised water, and Anaximenes air. This interpretation was countenanced by some striking passages of Herakleitus: but when we put together all that remains from him, it appears that his main doctrine was not physical, but metaphysical or ontological: that the want of adequate general terms induced him to clothe it in a multitude of symbolical illustrations, among which fire was only one, though the most prominent and most significant.82 Xenophanes and the Eleates had recognised, as the only objective reality, One extended Substance or absolute Ens, perpetual, infinite, indeterminate, incapable of change or modification. They denied the objective reality of motion, change, generation, and destruction — considering all these to be purely relative and phenomenal. Herakleitus on the contrary denied everything in the nature of a permanent and perpetual substratum: he laid down nothing as permanent and perpetual except the process of change — the alternate sequence of generation and destruction, without beginning or end — generation and destruction being in fact coincident or identical, two sides of the same process, since the generation of one particular state was the destruction of its antecedent contrary.

All reality consisted in the succession and transition, the coming and going, of these finite and particular states: what he conceived as the infinite and universal, was the continuous process of transition from one finite state to the next — the perpetual work of destruction and generation combined, which terminated one finite state in order to make room for a new and contrary state.