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Rh . "Men, however," he adds, "imagine that the gods are born, are clothed in our garments, and endowed with our form and figure. But if oxen or lions had hands, and could paint and fashion things as men do, they too would form the gods after their own similitude, horses making them like horses, and oxen like oxen." He then finds severe fault with Homer and Hesiod on account of the disgraceful actions which they attribute to the gods, and strongly reprehends the prevalent superstition in regard to the generation or genealogy of the gods. Aristotle refers to this (Rhet. ii. 23), where he remarks, "It is a saying of Xenophanes that those who assert that the gods are born are equally impious with those who maintain that they die. For both equally affirm that there is a time when the gods are not." But opposed as Xenophanes was to the popular superstitions, and anxious as he was to correct them, he professes himself unwilling to dogmatise about the gods or about anything else. "For," says he, "naught is with certainty known; mere opinion cleaveth to all things—.”

5. Nevertheless, in his philosophy, of which I now proceed to speak, he aims, to some extent at least, at certainty and truth. The great distinction or antithesis around which the whole Eleatic philosophy revolves and gravitates is the antithesis of the one and the many, the permanent and the changeable,