Page:Philosophical & Other Essays.pdf/71

 ARISTOTLE'S CRITICISM OF THE ELEATICS 35 Parmenides with the idea of a mere globular form of ultimate being, "a fixed and homogeneous mass, symme- trically extended from its centre on all sides "33. Zeller, however, admits a little further on that we would be justified in rejecting this description as metaphorical, only if we could otherwise find any indication that Par- menides conceived Being as incorporeal. It is just this incorporeality of Parmenides' Being which we hope to establish by reference to the ontological strain of Par- menides' thought as understood both by Plato and Aris- totle; but before we proceed to the Platonic-Aristotelian interpretation, we shall first dismiss the materialistic interpretation of Parmenides by discovering the root- source of the fallacy. 7. The Fallacy of the Materialistic Interpretation of Parmenides by Burnet and Zeller exposed. The fundamen- tal mistake of Burnet and Zeller and other similar inter- preters of Parmenides consists in their fallacious identi- fication of an analogy with a fact. Shutting their eyes. deliberately to the general tenor of Parmenides' Poem which is unmistakably ontological, these critics have pinned their hope on a single passage which is as follows:-

αὐτὰρ ἐπεί πειρας πύματον,τετελεσμένον ἐστὶ πάντοϑεν, εὐκύκλου σφαίρης ἐναλίγκιον όγκῳ, μεσσόθεν ἰσοπαλὲς πάντῃ.

Now anybody who will take the trouble of interpreting this Greek passage will see immediately that Being is here "compared to a sphere, and not "identified " with it. It must be remembered that:

33. Zeller 1. 589. 34. Ibid.
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