2: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST

Parmenides himself had borrowed the thought from another, though he made it his own. Plato, in The Republic, as a critic of Homer, by way of fitting Homer the better for the use of the schoolboys of the ideal city, is ready to sacrifice much of that graceful polytheism in which the Greeks anticipated the dulia of saints and angels in the catholic church. He does this to the advantage of a very abstract, and as it may seem disinterested, certainly an uninteresting, notion of deity, which is in truth:--well! one of the dry sticks of mere "natural theology," as it is called. In this he was but following the first, the original, founder of the Eleatic School, Xenophanes, who in a somewhat scornful spirit had urged on men's attention that, in their prayers and sacrifices to the gods, in all their various thoughts and statements, graceful or hideous, about them, they had only all along with much fallacy been making gods after their own likeness, as horse or dog too, if perchance it cast a glance towards heaven, would after the same manner project thither the likeness of horse or dog: that to think of deity you must think of it as neither here nor there, then nor now; you must away with all limitations of time and space and matter, nay, with the very conditions, the limitation, of thought itself; apparently not [34] observing that to think of it in this way was in reality not to think of it at all:--That in short Being so pure as this is pure Nothing.

In opposition then to the anthropomorphic religious poetry of Homer, Xenophanes elaborates the notion, or rather the abstract or purely verbal definition, of that which really is (to on)+ as inconclusive of all time, and space, and mode; yet so that all which can be identified concretely with mode and space and time is but antithetic to it, as finite to infinite, seeming to being, contingent to necessary, the temporal, in a word, to the eternal. Once for all, in harshest dualism, the only true yet so barren existence is opposed to the world of phenomena--of colour and form and sound and imagination and love, of empirical knowledge. Objects, real objects, as we know, grow in reality towards us in proportion as we define their various qualities. And yet, from another point of view, definition, qualification, is a negative process: it is as if each added quality took from the object we are defining one or more potential qualities. The more definite things become as objects of sensible or other empirical apprehension, the more, it might be said from the logician's point of view, have we denied about them. It might seem that their increasing reality as objects of sense was in direct proportion to the increase of their distance from that perfect Being which is everywhere and at all times in every possible mode of being. A [35] thing visibly white is found as one approaches it to be also smooth to the touch; and this added quality, says the formal logician, does but deprive it of all other possible modes of texture; Omnis determinatio est negatio.+ Vain puerilities! you may exclaim:--with justice. Yet such are the considerations which await the mind that suffers itself to dwell awhile on the abstract formula to which the "rational theology" of Xenophanes leads him. It involved the assertion of an absolute difference between the original and all that is or can be derived from it; that the former annuls, or is exclusive of, the latter, which has in truth no real or legitimate standing-ground as matter of knowledge; that, in opposite yet equally unanswerable senses, at both ends of experience there is-- nothing! Of the most concrete object, as of the most abstract, it might be said, that it more properly is not than is.

From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek religious poets, that most abstract and arid of formulae, Pure Being, closed in indifferently on every side upon itself, and suspended in the midst of nothing, like a hard transparent crystal ball, as he says; "The Absolute"; "The One"; passed to his fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking, doubtless in the true spirit of philosophy, for the centre of the universe, of his own experience of it, for some common measure of the experience of all men. To enforce a reasonable unity and order, to impress some larger likeness of reason, [36] as one knows it in one's self, upon the chaotic infinitude of the impressions that reach us from every side, is what all philosophy as such proposes. Kosmos;+ order; reasonable, delightful, order; is a word that became very dear, as we know, to the Greek soul, to what was perhaps most essentially Greek in it, to the Dorian element there. Apollo, the Dorian god, was but its visible consecration. It was what, under his blessing, art superinduced upon the rough stone, the yielding clay, the jarring metallic strings, the common speech of every day. Philosophy, in its turn, with enlarging purpose, would project a similar light of intelligence upon the at first sight somewhat unmeaning world we find actually around us:--project it; or rather discover it, as being really pre-existent there, if one were happy enough to get one's self into the right point of view. To certain fortunate minds the efficacious moment of insight would come, when, with delightful adaptation of means to ends, of the parts to the whole, the entire scene about one, bewildering, unsympathetic, unreasonable, on a superficial view, would put on, for them at least, kosmiotês,+ that so welcome expression of fitness, which it is the business of the fine arts to convey into material things, of the art of discipline to enforce upon the lives of men. The primitive Ionian philosophers had found, or thought they found, such a principle (archê)+ in the force of some omnipresent physical element, [37] air, water, fire; or in some common law, motion, attraction, repulsion; as Plato would find it in an eternally appointed hierarchy of genus and species; as the science of our day embraces it (perhaps after all only in fancy) in the expansion of a large body of observed facts into some all-comprehensive hypothesis, such as "evolution."

For Parmenides, at his early day, himself, as some remnants of his work in that direction bear witness, an acute and curious observer of the concrete and sensible phenomena of nature, that principle of reasonable unity seemed attainable only by a virtual negation, by the obliteration, of all such phenomena. When we have learned as exactly as we can all the curious processes at work in our own bodies or souls, in the stars, in or under the earth, their very definiteness, their limitation, will but make them the more antagonistic to that which alone really is, because it is always and everywhere itself, identical exclusively with itself. Phenomena!--by the force of such arguments as Zeno's, the instructed would make a clean sweep of them, for the establishment, in the resultant void, of the "One," with which it is impossible (para panta legomena)+ in spite of common language, and of what seems common sense, for the "Many"--the hills and cities of Greece, you and me, Parmenides himself, really to co-exist at all. "Parmenides," says one, "had stumbled upon [38] the modern thesis that thought and being are the same."

Something like this--this impossibly abstract doctrine--is what Plato's "father in philosophy" had had to proclaim, in the midst of the busy, brilliant, already complicated life of the recently founded colonial town of Elea. It was like the revelation to Israel in the midst of picturesque idolatries, "The Lord thy God is one Lord";+ only that here it made no claim to touch the affections, or even to warm the imagination. Israel's Greek cousin was to undergo a harder, a more distant and repressive discipline in those matters, to which a peculiarly austere moral beauty, at once self-reliant and submissive, the aesthetic expression of which has a peculiar, an irresistible charm, would in due time correspond.

It was in difficult hexameter verse, in a poem which from himself or from others had received the title--Peri physeôs+ (De Naturâ Rerum) that Parmenides set forth his ideas. From the writings of Clement of Alexandria, and other later writers large in quotation, diligent modern scholarship has collected fragments of it, which afford sufficient independent evidence of his manner of thought, and supplement conveniently Plato's, of course highly subjective, presentment in his Parmenides of what had so deeply influenced him.-- [39] "Now come!" (this fragment of Parmenides is in Proclus, who happened to quote it in commenting on the Timaeus of Plato) "Come! do you listen, and take home what I shall tell you: what are the two paths of search after right understanding. The one,

     hê men hopôs estin te kai hôs ouk esti mê einai?+

"that what is, is; and that what is not, is not"; or, in the Latin of scholasticism, here inaugurated by Parmenides, esse ens: non esse non ens--

     peithous esti keleuthos; alêtheiê gar opêdei?+

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