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Updated: June 10, 2025
The Greeks trusted to nature, trusted the natural propensity of the mind, trusted language above all, in so far as it naturally externalizes thought. Rather than lay blame on the attitude of thought and language toward the course of things, they preferred to pronounce the course of things itself to be wrong. Such, indeed, was the sentence passed by the philosophers of the Eleatic school.
They had sprung up in the decline of the Eleatic philosophy and were very familiar to Plato, as we gather from the Parmenides. The consciousness of them had led the great Eleatic philosopher to describe the nature of God or Being under negatives.
I. In both divisions of the dialogue the principal speaker is the same, and the method pursued by him is also the same, being a criticism on received opinions: first, on the doctrine of Ideas; secondly, of Being. From the Platonic Ideas we naturally proceed to the Eleatic One or Being which is the foundation of them.
The disciples of the Eleatic school in ancient Greece, not less than those of the modern schools of Germany, insisted on the identity of thought and its object, and regarded everything that might seem to be external to the mind as a mere illusion.
To the Eleatic system thus originating with Xenophanes is to be attributed the dialectic phase henceforward so prominently exhibited by Greek philosophy.
If we require to reach a conception of this kind with regard to change, the Eleatic dialectic is there to establish it beyond dispute, and positive science comes to the same conclusion, since it shows us everywhere nothing but movements placed upon movements, never fixed "things," except as temporary symbols of what we leave at a given moment outside the field of study.
To men who maintained that science was impossible, philosophy is not much indebted, although they were disciples of Socrates. Euclid merely gave a new edition of the Eleatic doctrines, and Phaedo speculated on the oneness of the good. It was not till Plato arose that a more complete system of philosophy was founded.
The genius of Greek art seems to triumph over the traditions of Pythagorean, Eleatic, or Megarian systems, and 'the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy' has at least a superficial reconcilement.
He rejected the Eleatic decisions against the reality of space and motion on the ground that, since motion obviously took place, the void must be a reality, even if the metaphysician could not conceive it. Given motion and sufficient time, these might by fortuitous concourse make all possible combinations. And it was one of these combinations which we call the world as we find it.
With abstinence also, and above all with that noblest abstinence, the abstinence from vice and wrong. The laughing philosopher Atoms and void No god and no truth III. LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS. Leucippus is variously called a native of Elea, of Abdera, of Melos, of Miletus. He was a pupil of Zeno the Eleatic. Democritus was a native of Abdera.
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