“Horses that bore me, impelled by their courage, Brought me to the much-famed streets of the goddess Who leads the wise man to every kind of knowledge. Maidens point out the way. The axle sings hot as the daughters of Helios quickly approach, Leaving the dwelling of night, pressing on to the light, With mighty hands raising the sheltering veil.”
The maidens are, according to Sextus (adv. Math. VII. 112, 113), the senses, and Helios’ daughters are more especially the eyes:— “These are the gates of the pathways of night and of day. Now the heavenly maidens approach the great doors, Whose lock double-turned the punishing Dice protects. To this one soft words were by the maidens addressed Subtly persuading her the barriers of oak from the gates, Now to withdraw. Yet these, Directly the yawning breadth of the doors was revealed, Drove the horses and waggon, on through the gate. The goddess received me in friendship, seized with her one hand my right, And turning towards me, she said: ‘Oh, thou, who with guides all immortal and horses, Camest here in my palace,—be welcome, young man. For no evil fate has led thee into this path, (Indeed it lies far from the ways of a man) But Themis and Dice. Now shalt thou all things explore, The heart never-flinching of the truth that persuades, The transient opinions which are not to be trusted. But from such paths keep the inquiring soul far away. On this way let not the much followed custom Cause thee to take the rash eye as thy guide, Or the confused sounding ear and the tongue. Ponder considerately With thy reason alone, the doctrine much and often examined, Which I will proclaim. For there lacks but desire on your way.’”
The goddess develops everything from the double knowledge (_α_) of thought, of the truth, and (_β_) of opinion; these make up the two parts of the poem. In another fragment taken from Simplicius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (p. 25; 19 a) and from Proclus on the Timæus (p. 29 b), we have the principal part of what is here related preserved to us. “Understand,” says the goddess, “which are the two roads of knowledge. The one which is only Being, and which is not non-being, is the path of conviction, the truth is in it. The other that is not Being, and which is necessarily non-being, is, I must tell you, a path quite devoid of reason, for thou canst neither know, or attain to, or express, non-being.” The nothing, in fact, turns into something, since it is thought or is said: we say something, think something, if we wish to think and say the nothing. “It is necessary that saying and thinking should be Being; for Being is, but nothing is not at all.” There the matter is stated in brief; and in this nothing, falls negation generally, or in more concrete form, limitation, the finite, restriction: _determinatio est negatio_ is Spinoza’s great saying. Parmenides says, whatever form the negation may take, it does not exist at all. To consider the nothing as the true is “the way of error in which the ignorant and double-minded mortals wander. Perplexity of mind sways the erring sense. Those who believe Being and non-being to be the same, and then again not the same, are like deaf and blind men surprised, like hordes confusedly driven.” The error is to confuse them and to ascribe the same value to each, or to distinguish them as if non-being were the limited generally. “Whichever way is taken, it leads back to the point from which it started.” It is a constantly self-contradictory and disintegrating movement. To human ideas, now this is held to be reality and now its opposite, and then again a mixture of both.
Simplicius quotes further, in writing on Aristotle’s Physics (p. 17 a; 31, 19): “But the truth is only the ‘is’; this is neither begotten of anything else, nor transient, entire, alone in its class (_μουνογενές_), unmoved and without end; it neither was, nor will be, but is at once the all. For what birth wouldst thou seek for it? How and whence should it be augmented? That it should be from that which is not, I shall allow thee neither to say nor to think, for neither can it be said or thought that the ‘is’ is not. What necessity had either later or earlier made it begin from the nothing? Thus must it throughout only be or not be; nor will any force of conviction ever make something else arise out of that which is not. Thus origination has disappeared, and decease is incredible. Being is not separable, for it is entirely like itself; it is nowhere more, else would it not hold together, nor is it less, for everything is full of Being. The all is one coherent whole, for Being flows into unison with Being: it is unchangeable and rests securely in itself; the force of necessity holds it within the bounds of limitation. It cannot hence be said that it is imperfect; for it is without defect, while non-existence is wanting in all.” This Being is not the undetermined (_ἄπειρον_) for it is kept within the limits of necessity; we similarly find in Aristotle that limitation is ascribed to Parmenides. The sense in which the expression “limit” is to be taken is uncertain. According to Parmenides, however, this absolute limitation is as _Δίκη_, absolute necessity clearly determined in itself; and it is an important fact that he went beyond the uncultured conception of the infinite. “Thought, and that on account of which thought is, are the same. For not without that which is, in which it expresses itself (_ἐν ᾦ πεφατισμένον ἐστίν_), wilt thou find Thought, seeing that it is nothing and will be nothing outside of that which is.” That is the main point. Thought produces itself, and what is produced is a Thought. Thought is thus identical with Being, for there is nothing beside Being, this great affirmation. Plotinus, in quoting (V. Ennead. I. 8) this last fragment says: “Parmenides adopted this point of view, inasmuch as he did not place Being in sensuous things; identifying Being with Thought, he maintained it to be unchangeable.” The Sophists concluded from this: “All is truth; there is no error, for error is the non-existent, that which is not to be thought.”
Since in this an advance into the region of the ideal is observable, Parmenides began Philosophy proper. A man now constitutes himself free from all ideas and opinions, denies their truth, and says necessity alone, Being, is the truth. This beginning is certainly still dim and indefinite, and we cannot say much of what it involves; but to take up this position certainly is to develop Philosophy proper, which has not hitherto existed. The dialectic that the transient has no truth, is implied in it, for if these determinations are taken as they are usually understood, contradictions ensue. In Simplicius (in Arist. Phys. p. 27 b.; 31 b.) we have further metaphorical images from Parmenides. “Since the utmost limit of Being is perfect, it resembles on every side the form of a well rounded sphere, which from its centre extends in all directions equally, for it can be neither larger or smaller in one part or another. There is no non-being which prevents it from attaining to the like”—from coming into unity with itself—“and there is no Being where it was devoid of Being, here more and there less. Because the all is without defect, it is in all places in the same way like itself in its determinations.” Plotinus in the passage quoted says: “He compares Being with the spherical form, because it comprehends all in itself, and Thought is not outside of this, but is contained in it.” And Simplicius says: “We must not wonder at him, for on account of the poetic form, he adopts a mythological fiction (_πλάσματος_).” It immediately strikes us that the sphere is limited, and furthermore in space, and hence another must be above it; but then the Notion of the sphere is the similarity of withholding the different, notwithstanding that even the undifferentiated must be expressed; hence this image is inconsistent.
Parmenides adds to this doctrine of the truth, the doctrine of human opinions, the illusive system of the world. Simplicius, writing on Aristotle’s Physics (p. 7 b; 39 a), tells us that he says: “Men have two forms of opinion, one of which should not be, and in it they are mistaken; they set them in opposition to one another in form and symbol. The one, the ethereal fire of the flame, is quite fine, identical with itself throughout, but not identical with the other, for that is also for itself; on the other hand there is what belongs to night, or thick and ponderous existence.” By the former, warmth, softness, lightness is expressed, and by the latter, cold. “But since everything is called light and night, and their qualities are suited both to the one kind of things and the other, everything alike is filled with light and dark night; both are alike since nothing exists without both.” Aristotle (Met. I. 3 and 5), and the other historians, likewise unanimously attribute to Parmenides the fact that he sets forth two principles for the system of manifest things, warmth and cold, through the union of which everything is. Light, fire, is the active and animate; night, cold, is called the passive.
Parmenides also speaks like a Pythagorean—he was called _ἀνὲρ Πυθαγορεῖος_ by Strabo—in the following, and likewise mythological conception: “There are circlets wound round one another, one of which is of the rare element and the other of the dense, between which others are to be found, composed of light and darkness mingled. Those which are less are of impure fire, but those over them of night, through which proceed the forces of the flames. That which holds this all together, however, is something fixed, like a wall, under which there is a fiery wreath, and the most central of the rare spheres again is fiery. The most central of those mixed is the goddess that reigns over all, the Divider (_κληροῦχος_), Dice and Necessity. For she is the principle of all earthly produce and intermingling, which impels the male to mix with the female, and conversely; she took Love to help her, creating him first amongst the gods. The air is an exhalation (_ἀναπνοή_) of the earth; the sun and the milky way, the breath of fire; and the moon is air and fire mingled, &c.”[54] It still remains to us to explain the manner in which Parmenides regarded sensation and thought, which may undoubtedly at first sight seem to be materialistic. Theophrastus,[55] for example, remarks in this regard: “Parmenides said nothing more than that there are two elements. Knowledge is determined according to the preponderance of the one or of the other; for, according as warmth or cold predominate, thought varies; it becomes better and purer through warmth, and yet it requires also a certain balance.”
“For as in each man there still is in his dispersive limbs an intermingling, So is the understanding of man; for that Which is thought by men, is the nature of the limbs, Both in one and all; for thought is indeed the most.”[56] He thus takes sensation and thought to be the same, and makes remembrance and oblivion to arise from these through mingling them, but whether in the intermingling they take an equal place, whether this is thought or not, and what condition this is, he leaves quite undetermined. But that he ascribes sensation to the opposites in and for themselves is clear, because he says: “The dead do not feel light or warmth or hear voices, because the fire is out of them; they feel cold, stillness and the opposite, however, and, speaking generally, each existence has a certain knowledge.” In fact, this view of Parmenides is really the opposite of materialism, for materialism consists in putting together the soul from parts, or independent forces (the wooden horse of the senses).
3. MELISSUS.
3. MELISSUS.
There is little to tell about the life of Melissus. Diogenes Laertius (IX. 24) calls him a disciple of Parmenides, but the discipleship is uncertain; it is also said of him that he associated with Heraclitus. He was born in Samos, like Pythagoras, and was besides a distinguished statesman amongst his people. It is said by Plutarch (in Pericle, 26) that, as admiral of the Samians, he gained in battle a victory over the Athenians. He flourished about the 84th Olympiad (444 B.C.).
In regard to his philosophy, too, there is little to say. Aristotle, where he mentions him, places him always with Parmenides, as resembling him in mode of thought. Simplicius, writing on Aristotle’s Physics (p. 7 sqq.), has preserved several fragments of his prose writings on Nature, which show the same kind of thoughts and arguments as we find in Parmenides, but, in part, somewhat more developed. It was a question whether the reasoning in which it is shown that change does not exist, or contradicts itself, which, by Aristotle in his incomplete, and, in some parts, most corrupt work on Xenophanes, Zeno, and Gorgias (c. 2.), was ascribed to Xenophanes, did not really belong to Melissus.[57] Since the beginning, in which we are told whose reasoning it is, is wanting, conjecture only applies it to Xenophanes. The writing begins with the words “He says,” without any name being given. It thus depends on the superscription alone whether Aristotle speaks of the philosophy of Xenophanes or not, and it must be noticed that different hands have put different superscriptions. Indeed, there is in this work (c. 2) an opinion of Xenophanes mentioned in such a way that it appears as though had what was previously quoted by Aristotle been by him ascribed to Xenophanes, the expression would have been different. It is possible that Zeno is meant, as the internal evidence abundantly shows. There is in it a dialectic more developed in form, more real reflexion, than from the verses could be expected, not from Xenophanes alone, but even from Parmenides. For Aristotle expressly says that Xenophanes does not yet determine with precision; thus the cultured reasoning contained in Aristotle must certainly be denied to Xenophanes; at least, it is so far certain that Xenophanes himself did not know how to express his thoughts in a manner so orderly and precise as that found here. We find it said:— “If anything is, it is eternal (_ἀΐδιον_).” Eternity is an awkward word, for it immediately makes us think of time and mingle past and future as an infinite length of time; but what is meant is that _ἀΐδιον_ is the self-identical, supersensuous, unchangeable, pure present, which is without any time-conception. It is, origination and change are shut out; if it commences, it does so out of nothing or out of Being. “It is impossible that anything should arise from the nothing. If everything could have arisen, or could it merely not have been everything eternally, it would equally have arisen out of nothing. For, if everything had arisen, nothing would once have existed. If some were alone the existent out of which the rest sprang, the one would be more and greater. But the more and greater would thus have arisen out of the nothing of itself, for in the less there is not its more, nor in the smaller its greater.”
Simplicius makes this note to the Physics of Aristotle (p. 22 b): “No more can anything arise out of the existent, for the existent already is, and thus does not first arise from the existent.”
“As eternal, the existent also is unlimited, since it has no beginning from which it came, nor end in which it ceases. The infinite all is one, for, if there were two or more, they would limit one another,” and thus have a beginning and end. The one would be the nothing of the other and come forth from this nothing. “This one is like itself; for if it were unlike it would no longer be the one that was posited, but many. This one is likewise immovable, inasmuch as it does not move itself, since it does not pass out into anything. In passing out, it would require to do so into what is full or what is empty; it could not be into the full, for that is an impossibility, and just as little could it be into what is empty, for that is the nothing. The one, therefore, is in this way devoid of pain or suffering, not changing in position or form, or mingling with what is different. For all these determinations involve the origination of non-being and passing away of Being, which is impossible.” Thus here again the contradiction which takes place when origination and passing away are spoken of, is revealed.
Now Melissus places opinion in opposition to this truth. The change and multiplicity extinguished in Being appears on the other side, in consciousness, as in what is opinionative; it is necessary to say this if only the negative side, the removal of these moments, the Absolute as destitute of predicate, is laid hold of. “In sensuous perception the opposite is present for us; that is to say, a number of things, their change, their origination and passing away, and their intermingling. Thus that first knowledge must take its place beside this second, which has as much certainty for ordinary consciousness as the first.” Melissus does not seem to have decided for the one or the other, but, oscillating between both, to have limited the knowledge of the truth to the statement that, speaking generally, between two opposite modes of presentation, the more probable opinion is to be preferred, but that what is so preferred is only to be regarded as the stronger opinion, and not as truth. This is what Aristotle says of him.
Since Aristotle, in distinguishing his philosophy from the philosophy of Parmenides, maintains that in the first place Parmenides seems to understand the One as the principle of thought, and Melissus as matter, we must remark that this distinction falls away in pure existence, Being, or the One. Pure matter, as also pure thought (if I am to speak of such a distinction), are not present to Parmenides and Melissus, since they are abrogated; and it must only be in the manner of his expression that one of them—according to Aristotle (Phys. I. 2), on account of his clumsier mode of treatment (_μᾶλλον φορτικός_)—could seem to have conceived of the other sense. If the difference consisted secondly in the fact that Parmenides regarded the one as limited and Melissus as unlimited, this limitation of the one would, in effect, immediately contradict the philosophy of Parmenides; for since limit is the non-being of Being, non-being would thus be posited. But when Parmenides speaks of limit, we see that his poetic language is not altogether exact; limit, however, as pure limit, is just simple Being and absolute negativity, in which all else said and set forth is sublated. Necessity, as this pure negativity and movement within itself, although impassive thought, is absolutely bound to its opposite. In the third place it may be said that Parmenides set forth a concomitant philosophy of opinion or reality, to which Being as existence for thought was thus more opposed than was the case with Melissus.
4. ZENO.
What specially characterizes Zeno is the dialectic which, properly speaking, begins with him; he is the master of the Eleatic school in whom its pure thought arrives at the movement of the Notion in itself and becomes the pure soul of science. That is to say, in the Eleatics hitherto considered, we only have the proposition: “The nothing has no reality and is not at all, and thus what is called origin and decease disappears.” With Zeno, on the contrary, we certainly see just such an assertion of the one and removal of what contradicts it, but we also see that this assertion is not made the starting point; for reason begins by calmly demonstrating in that which is established as existent, its negation. Parmenides asserts that “The all is immutable, for, in change, the non-being of that which is would be asserted, but Being only is; in saying that non-being is, the subject and the predicate contradict themselves.” Zeno, on the other hand, says: “Assert your change; in it as change there is the negation to it, or it is nothing.” To the former change existed as motion, definite and complete. Zeno protested against motion as such, or pure motion. “Pure Being is not motion; it is rather the negation of motion.” We find it specially interesting that there is in Zeno the higher consciousness, the consciousness that when one determination is denied, this negation is itself again a determination, and then in the absolute negation not one determination, but both the opposites must be negated. Zeno anticipated this, and because he foresaw that Being is the opposite of nothing, he denied of the One what must be said of the nothing. But the same thing must occur with all the rest. We find this higher dialectic in Plato’s Parmenides; here it only breaks forth in respect to some determinations, and not to the determination of the One and of Being. The higher consciousness is the consciousness of the nullity of Being as of what is determined as against the nothing, partly found in Heraclitus and then in the Sophists; with them it never has any truth, it has no existence in itself, but is only the for-another, or the assurance of the individual consciousness, and assurance as refutation, i.e. the negative side of dialectic.
According to Diogenes Laertius, (IX. 25) Zeno was likewise an Eleat; he is the youngest, and lived most in company with Parmenides. The latter became very fond of him and adopted him as a son; his own father was called Telentagoras. Not in his State alone was his conduct held in high respect, for his fame was universal, and he was esteemed particularly as a teacher. Plato mentions that men came to him from Athens and other places, in order to profit from his learning.[58] Proud self-sufficiency is ascribed to him by Diogenes (IX. 28) because he—with the exception of a journey made to Athens—continued to reside in Elea, and did not stay a longer time in the great, mighty Athens, and there attain to fame. In very various narratives his death was made for ever celebrated for the strength of his mind evinced in it; it was said that he freed a State (whether his own home at Elea or in Sicily, is not known) from its Tyrant (the name is given differently, but an exact historical account has not been recorded) in the following way, and by the sacrifice of his life. He entered into a plot to overthrow the Tyrant, but this was betrayed. When the Tyrant now, in face of the people, caused him to be tortured in every possible way to get from him an avowal of his confederates, and when he questioned him about the enemies of the State, Zeno first named to the Tyrant all his friends as participators in the plot, and then spoke of the Tyrant himself as the pest of the State. The powerful remonstrances or the horrible tortures and death of Zeno aroused the citizens, inspired them with courage to fall upon the Tyrant, kill him, and liberate themselves. The manner of the end, and his violent and furious state of mind, is very variously depicted. He is said to have pretended to wish to say something into the Tyrant’s ear, and then to have bitten his ear, and thus held him fast until he was slain by the others. Others say that he seized him by the nose between his teeth; others that as on his reply great tortures were applied, he bit off his tongue and spat it into the Tyrant’s face, to show him that he could get nothing from him, and that he then was pounded in a mortar.[59] It has just been noticed that Zeno had the very important character of being the originator of the true objective dialectic. Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Melissus, start with the proposition: “Nothing is nothing; the nothing does not exist at all, or the like is real existence,” that is, they make one of the opposed predicates to be existence. Now when they encounter the opposite in a determination, they demolish this determination, but it is only demolished through another, through my assertion, through the distinction that I form, by which one side is made to be the true, and the other the null. We have proceeded from a definite proposition; the nullity of the opposite does not appear in itself; it is not that it abrogates itself, i.e. that it contains a contradiction in itself. For instance, I assert of something that it is the null; then I show this by hypothesis in motion, and it follows that it is the null. But another consciousness does not assert this; I declare one thing to be directly true; another has the right of asserting something else as directly true, that is to say, motion. Similarly what seems to be the case when one philosophic system contradicts another, is that the first is pre-established, and that men starting from this point of view, combat the other. The matter is thus easily settled by saying: “The other has no truth, because it does not agree with me,” and the other has the right to say the same. It does not help if I prove my system or my proposition and then conclude that thus the opposite is false; to this other proposition the first always seems to be foreign and external. Falsity must not be demonstrated through another, and as untrue because the opposite is true, but in itself; we find this rational perception in Zeno.
In Plato’s Parmenides (pp. 127, 128, Steph., pp. 6, 7, Bekk.) this dialectic is very well described, for Plato makes Socrates say of it: “Zeno in his writings asserts fundamentally the same as does Parmenides, that All is One, but he would feign delude us into believing that he was telling something new. Parmenides thus shows in his poems that All is One; Zeno, on the contrary, shows that the Many cannot be.” Zeno replies, that “He wrote thus really against those who try to make Parmenides’ position ridiculous, for they try to show what absurdities and self-contradictions can be derived from his statements; he thus combats those who deduce Being from the many, in order to show that far more absurdities arise from this than from the statements of Parmenides.” That is the special aim of objective dialectic, in which we no longer maintain simple thought for itself, but see the battle fought with new vigour within the enemy’s camp. Dialectic has in Zeno this negative side, but it has also to be considered from its positive side.
According to the ordinary ideas of science, where propositions result from proof, proof is the movement of intelligence, a connection brought about by mediation. Dialectic is either (_α_) external dialectic, in which this movement is different from the comprehension of the movement, or (_β_) not a movement of our intelligence only, but what proceeds from the nature of the thing itself, i.e. from the pure Notion of the content. The former is a manner of regarding objects in such a way that reasons are revealed and new light thrown, by means of which all that was supposed to be firmly fixed, is made to totter; there may be reasons which are altogether external too, and we shall speak further of this dialectic when dealing with the Sophists. The other dialectic, however, is the immanent contemplation of the object; it is taken for itself, without previous hypothesis, idea or obligation, not under any outward conditions, laws or causes; we have to put ourselves right into the thing, to consider the object in itself, and to take it in the determinations which it has. In regarding it thus, it shows from itself that it contains opposed determinations, and thus breaks up; this dialectic we more especially find in the ancients. The subjective dialectic, which reasons from external grounds, is moderate, for it grants that: “In the right there is what is not right, and in the false the true.” True dialectic leaves nothing whatever to its object, as if the latter were deficient on one side only; for it disintegrates itself in the entirety of its nature. The result of this dialectic is null, the negative; the affirmative in it does not yet appear. This true dialectic may be associated with the work of the Eleatics. But in their case the real meaning and quality of philosophic understanding was not great, for they got no further than the fact that through contradiction the object is a nothing.
Zeno’s dialectic of matter has not been refuted to the present day; even now we have not got beyond it, and the matter is left in uncertainty. Simplicius, writing on the Physics of Aristotle (p. 30), says: “Zeno proves that if the many is, it must be great and small; if great, the many must be infinite in number” (it must have gone beyond the manifold, as indifferent limit, into the infinite; but what is infinite is no longer large and no longer many, for it is the negation of the many). “If small, it must be so small as to have no size,” like atoms. “Here he shows that what has neither size, thickness nor mass, cannot be. For if it were added to another, it would not cause its increase; were it, that is to say, to have no size and be added thereto, it could not supplement the size of the other and consequently that which is added is nothing. Similarly were it taken away, the other would not be made less, and thus it is nothing. If what has being is, each existence necessarily has size and thickness, is outside of one another, and one is separate from the other; the same applies to all else (_περὶ τοῦ προὔχοντος_), for it, too, has size, and in it there is what mutually differs (_προέξει αὐτοῦ τι_). But it is the same thing to say something once and to say it over and over again; in it nothing can be a last, nor will there not be another to the other. Thus if many are, they are small and great; small, so that they have no size; great, so that they are infinite.”