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Updated: June 4, 2025
Parmenides himself is the source of a peculiarly interesting strain of mysticism which pervades Plato's thought the mysticism which may be called "logical" because it is embodied in theories on logic.
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.
Empedocles was a poet whose verses stood the test of criticism. In this regard he is in a like position with Parmenides; but in neither case are the preserved fragments sufficient to enable us fully to estimate their author's scientific attainments. Philosophical writings are obscure enough at the best, and they perforce become doubly so when expressed in verse.
What that trinity however is in the theology of Plato, which doubtless gave birth to the Christian, will be evident to the intelligent from the notes on the Parmenides, and the extracts, from Damascius.
Scholia on the Cratylus, "Not every genus of the gods has an appellation; for with respect to the first Deity, who is beyond all things, Parmenides teaches us that he is ineffable; and the first genera of the intelligible gods, who are united to the one, and are called occult, have much of the unknown and ineffable.
Parmenides maintains that there are small coronets alternately twisted one within another, some made up of a thin, others of a condensed, matter; and there are others between mixed mutually together of light and of darkness, and around them all there is a solid substance, which like a firm wall surrounds these coronets.
The atoms are, in fact, just the continuous indivisible One of Parmenides multiplied ad infinitum in an infinite empty space.
But because we have passed over Socrates, who should have come next after Parmenides, we must now turn back our discourse to him.
Eternity or the eternal is not merely the unlimited in time but the truest of all Being, the most real of all realities, the most certain of all knowledge, which we nevertheless only see through a glass darkly. The passionate earnestness of Parmenides contrasts with the vacuity of the thought which he is revolving in his mind.
Advancing further, Parmenides told himself that if He alone really exists who is one and eternal and unchangeable, all else is not only inferior to Him, but is only a semblance, and that mankind, earth, sky, plants, and animals are only a vast illusion phantoms, a mirage, which would disappear, which would no longer exist, and would never have existed if we could perceive the Self-existent.
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