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Updated: June 2, 2025
And with that directness and audacity which was possible to the ancients, and of which Pythagoreans and Eleatics had already given brilliant examples, he set up these terms of discourse, like the Pythagorean numbers, for absolute and eternal entities, existing before all things, revealed in all things, giving the cosmic artificer his models and the creature his goal.
Thus, between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, AEschylus and Wagner, there is so much relationship, so many things in common, that one is vividly impressed with the very relative nature of all notions of time.
He revived and developed with much dialectical subtlety the metaphysical system of Parmenides and the Eleatics, maintaining that there is but one absolute existence, and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this are nothing.
We have seen how, from the material and tangible beginnings of the Ionians, the Eleatics land us not only in a blank atheism, but in a disbelief of the existence of the world. And though it may be said that these were only the isolated results of special schools, it is not to be forgotten that they were of schools the most advanced.
Thus Plato opposes the eternity of the intelligence to Ionic materialism, and the eternity of matter to the monistic theory of the Eleatics. In the genesis of nature we again find the synthetic conception of the elements, which he estimates to be four; to which geometrical forms correspond, and the world was finally organized after its human type.
Thus it was the opinion of certain ancient sages, that the earth and the whole system of the universe was the Deity himself; a doctrine most strenuously maintained by Zenophanes and the whole tribe of Eleatics, as also by Strabo and the sect of peripatetic philosophers.
But the Eleatics went beyond the realm of physics to pure metaphysical inquiries. This is the second stage in the history of philosophy an idealistic pantheism, which disregarded the sensible and maintained that the source of all truth is independent of sense.
The Eleatics are to be praised because the need of escaping from the contradictions in the world of experience led them to make themselves masters of the concept of being without relation and without negation, and of the simple, homogeneous quality of the existent in its full purity.
Empedocles, born B.C. 444, like others of the Eleatics, complained of the imperfection of the senses, and looked for truth only in reason. He regarded truth as a perfect unity, ruled by love, the only true force, the one moving cause of all things, the first creative power by whom the world was formed. Thus "God is love," a sublime doctrine which philosophy revealed to the Greeks.
A more dramatic opposition than the one which ensued between the Heracliteans and the Eleatics can scarcely be imagined both schools claiming a monopoly of reason and truth, both distrusting the senses, and each charging the other with illusion.
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