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Mnesiphilus, the most eminent of these immediate successors of Solon, was the instructor of Themistocles, the very antipodes of rhetoricians and refiners. But now a new age of philosophy was at hand. Already the Eleatic sages, Zeno and Parmenides, had travelled to Athens, and there proclaimed their doctrines, and Zeno numbered among his listeners and disciples the youthful Pericles.
To Melissus therefore, as to his predecessors, the world of sense was a world of illusion; the very first principles or assumptions of which, as of the truthfulness of the senses and the reality of the various objects which we see, are unthinkable and absurd. The weakness as well as the strength of the Eleatic position consisted in its purely negative and critical attitude.
In addition to the natural and partly ideal schools, the Ionic, the Eleatic, the Pythagorean and the Platonic, there arose those of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, which might be called mechanical, and that of Aristotle, which takes a middle course between the idea and the fact, between the dynamic and the mechanical explanation of the universe.
Of this too there was a shadow in the Eleatic philosophy in the realm of opinion, which, like a mist, seemed to darken the purity of truth in itself. So far the words of Plato may perhaps find an intelligible meaning. But when he goes on to speak of the Essence which is compounded out of both, the track becomes fainter and we can only follow him with hesitating steps.
The reader of this manual, for instance, will be invited to consider the Eleatic argumentation that nothing exists but Identity, "which is the beënt, and that Difference, the non-beënt, does not exist; and therefore that he must not only not go on talking about difference, but that he must not allude to difference as being anything but the non-beënt; for if he casts about for a synonym, and arrives at the notion that he may say non-existent for non-beënt, he is abjectly wrong, for beënt does not mean existent, and non-beënt non-existent, but it must be considered that the beënt is strictly the non-existent, and the existent the non-beënt."
From the material basis speculative philosophy gradually disengaged itself through the labours of the Eleatic school, the controversy as to the primary element receding into insignificance, and being replaced by investigations as to Time, Motion, Space, Thought, Being, God.
In fact, there is here an intimation of the waters, of the void or deep abyss, as the beginnings of the world; of the breath of the One, the hidden germ of things developed by means of heat; of productive powers as a lower, and energy as a higher form of nature; of conceptions found in the Ionic, the Pythagorean, and the Eleatic philosophies, which all converge into the one.
We have now reached the consideration of the Eleatic philosophy. It differs from the preceding in its neglect of material things, and its devotion to the supra-sensible. It derives its name from Elea, a Greek colonial city of Italy, its chief authors being Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno.
A second example of metaphysics may be found in the doctrines of the Eleatic philosophers, who early appeared in the Greek colonies on the coast of Italy, and thought hard about space and motion. Empty space seemed as good as nothing, and, as nothing could not be said to exist, space must be an illusion; and as motion implied space in which to take place, there could be no motion.
In the Eleatic school we have a succession of personal attempts to construct a domination in the theory of Nature; some ideal conception is attempted to be so elevated above the data of sensation as to override them altogether, and the general result we are now to see throughout the philosophic world, as it was seen also throughout the world of politics, in a total collapse of the principle of forced authority, and a development, of successively nearer approaches to anarchic individualism and doubt.
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