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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.
Thus Plato is led to a supra-sensible world, more real than the common world of sense, the unchangeable world of ideas, which alone gives to the world of sense whatever pale reflection of reality may belong to it.
Artists for ever admirable, the Greeks created a type of supra-sensible truth, as of sensible beauty, whose attraction is hard to resist. As soon as we incline to make metaphysics a systematization of science, we glide in the direction of Plato and of Aristotle. And, once in the zone of attraction in which the Greek philosophers moved, we are drawn along in their orbit.
Finally, it will have on the one hand the system of ideas, logically coördinated together or concentrated into one only, on the other a quasi-nought, the Platonic "non-being" or the Aristotelian "matter." But, having cut your cloth, you must sew it. With supra-sensible Ideas and an infra-sensible non-being, you now have to reconstruct the sensible world.
The latter was undoubtedly most keenly interested in the more human process of questioning and refuting, his object being the workmanlike creation of exact definitions. But Plato was of a different mould; his was the soaring spirit which felt its true home to be the supra-sensible world of Divine Beauty, Immortality, Absolute Truth and Existence.
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