Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/154

Rh is isolated from the world of Being? This happens, that the particular is prescinded from the universal; you are called upon to conceive particulars under the presidency of no universal; in other words, you are called upon to conceive a contradiction. The spurious existence which we supposed might be attributed to not-Being, and therefore to natural things, is a mere subterfuge, which, when examined, resolves itself into a contradiction. I don't say that such an attribution is inconsistent with the principles of every philosophy, but it is certainly inconsistent with the principles of the Eleatic philosophy; for this philosophy makes no attempt to conciliate the two members of the antithesis of which I have so often spoken, but, on the contrary, does all it can to draw them asunder into their widest opposition. And therefore it perishes beneath this twofold contradiction. The world of Being (the intelligible world of the Eleatics) is a contradiction to all reason, because it is the sphere of the universal prescinded absolutely from the particular; and the world of not-Being (the sensible world of the Eleatics) is also a contradiction to all reason, because it is the sphere of the particular prescinded absolutely from the universal. In the one world there is absolute unity without any diversity; in the other there is absolute diversity without any unity, and neither of these can be conceived.

23. In summing up the philosophy of Parmenides,