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 and Marie Louise, daughter of Charles IV., king of Spain). The new duke, unwilling to yield to the wishes of his people for greater political liberty, was soon compelled to take flight, and the duchy was for a time ruled by a provisional government and by Charles Albert of Sardinia; but in April 1849 Baron d’Aspre with 15,000 Austrians took possession of Parma, and the ducal government was restored under Austrian protection. Charles II. (who had in 1820 married Theresa, daughter of Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia) abdicated in favour of his son Charles III., on the 14th of March, 1849. On the assassination of Charles III. in 1854, his widow, Marie Louise (daughter of Ferdinand, prince of Artois and duke of Berry), became regent for her son Robert. In 1860 his possessions were formally incorporated with the new kingdom of Italy.

The duchy of Parma in 1849 had an area of 2376 sq. m. divided into five provinces—Borgo San Donnino, Valditaro, Parma, Lunigiana Parmense and Piacenza. Its population in 1851 was 497,343. Under Marie Louise (1815–1847) the territory of Guastalla (50 sq. m.) formed part of the duchy, but it was transferred in 1847 to Modena in exchange for the communes of Bagnone, Filattiera, &c., which went to constitute the Lunigiana Parmense.

 PARMENIDES OF ELEA (Velia) in Italy, Greek philosopher. According to Diogenes Laertius he was “in his prime” 504–500, and would thus seem to have been born about 539. Plato indeed (Parmenides, 127 B) makes Socrates see and hear Parmenides when the latter was about sixty-five years of age, in which case he cannot have been born before 519; but in the absence of evidence that any such meeting took place this may be regarded as one of Plato’s anachronisms. However this may be, Parmenides was a contemporary, probably a younger contemporary, of Heraclitus, with whom the first succession of physicists ended, while Empedocles and Anaxagoras, with whom the second succession of physicists began, were very much his juniors. Belonging, it is said, to a rich and distinguished family, Parmenides attached himself, at any rate for a time, to the aristocratic society or brotherhood which Pythagoras had established at Croton; and accordingly one part of his system, the physical part, is apparently Pythagorean. To Xenophanes, the founder of Eleaticism—whom he must have known, even if he was never in any strict sense of the word his disciple—Parmenides was, perhaps, more deeply indebted, as the theological speculations of that thinker unquestionably suggested to him the theory of Being and Not-Being, of the One and the Many, by which he sought to reconcile Ionian “monism,” or rather “henism,” with Italiote dualism. Tradition relates that Parmenides framed laws for the Eleates, who each year took an oath to observe them.

Parmenides embodied his tenets in a short poem, called Nature, of which fragments, amounting in all to about 160 lines, have been preserved in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, Simplicius and others. It is traditionally divided into three parts—the “Proem,” “Truth” ( ), and “Opinion”. In “Truth,” starting from the formula “the Ent (or existent) is, the Nonent (or non-existent) is not,” Parmenides attempted to distinguish between the unity or universal element of nature and its variety or particularity, insisting upon the reality of its unity, which is therefore the object of knowledge, and upon the unreality of its variety, which is therefore the object, not of knowledge, but of opinion. In “Opinion” he propounded a theory of the world of seeming and its development, pointing out however that, in accordance with the principles already laid down, these cosmological speculations do not pretend to anything more than probability. In spite of the contemptuous remarks of Cicero and Plutarch about Parmenides’s versification. Nature is not without literary merit. The introduction, though rugged, is forcible and picturesque; and the rest of the poem is written in a simple and effective style suitable to the subject.

In the truism “the Ent is, the Nonent is not,” , Parmenides breaks with his predecessors, the physicists of the Ionian succession. Asking themselves—What is the material universe, they had replied respectively—It is water. It is, It is air. It is fire. Thus, while their question meant, or ought to have meant. What is the single element which underlies the apparent plurality of the material world? their answers, Parmenides conceived, by attributing to the selected element various and varying qualities, reintroduced the plurality which the question sought to eliminate. If we would discover that which is common to all things at all times, we must, he submitted, exclude the differences of things, whether simultaneous or successive. Hence, whereas his predecessors had confounded that which is universally existent with that which is not universally existent, he proposed to distinguish carefully between that which is universally existent and that which is