Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/364

 842 HISTORY OF GRLECE. change? was it generation of something integrally nev and destruction of something preexistent, or was it a decomposition and recombination of elements still continuing. The theories of the various Ionic philosophers, and of Empedokles after them, admitting one, two, or four elementary substances, with Friend- ship and Enmity to serve as causes of motion or change ; the Homoeomeries of Anaxagoras, with Nous, or Intelligence, as the stirring and regularizing agent ; the atoms and void of Leukip- pus and Demokritus, all these were different hypotheses answer- ing to a similar vein of thought. All of them, though assuming that the sensible appearances of things were delusive and per- plexing, nevertheless, were borrowed more or less directly from some of these appearances, which were employed to explain and illustrate the whole theory, and served to render it plausible when stated as well as to defend it against attack. But the phi- losophers of the Eleatic school first Xenophanes, and after him Parmenides took a distinct path of their own. To find that which was real, and which lay as it were concealed behind or under the delusive phenomena of sense, they had recourse only to mental abstractions. They supposed a Substance or Something not perceivable by sense, but only cogitable or con- ceivable by reason ; a One and All, continuous and finite, which was not only real and self-existent, but was the only reality ; eternal, immovable, and unchangeable, and the only matter know- able. The phenomena of sense, which began and ended one after the other, they thought, were essentially delusive, uncertain, contradictory among themselves, and open to endless diversity of opinion. 1 Upon these, nevertheless, they announced an opin- ion ; adopting two elements, heat and cold, or light and darkness. Parmenides set forth this doctrine of the One and All in a poem, of which but a few fragments now remain, so that we understand very imperfectly the positive arguments employed to recommend it. The matter of truth and knowledge, such as he 1 See Parmenidis Fragmenta, ed. Karsten, v, 30, 55, 60 : also the Disser tation annexed by Karsten, sects. 3, 4, p. 148, seq.; sect. 19, p. 221, seq. Compare also Mullach's edition of Ihc same Fragments, annexed to his edition of the Aristotelian treatise, De Melisso, Xenophane, et Gorgia. p. 144.