INTRODUCTION.

Not-being is not, neither is there Becoming; for Becoming is the synthesis of Being and Not-being. Again if there is not Becoming, Motion exists not either, for Becoming is a motion, and all motion is becoming. Multitude, Motion, Becoming—all these are utterly obliterated and annihilated from out of the nature of things: only the One exists, abiding in its changeless eternity of stillness¹.

The Eleatic theory The school of philosophy founded in Elea, Italy, which argued that reality is a single, unchanging substance., taken by itself, is as inadequate as that of Herakleitos. § 7. Such is the answer returned by Parmenides and his school to the question asked at the beginning of our previous section. Material nature is in continual flux, you say, and cannot be known: good—then material nature does not exist. But Being or the One does exist and can be known, and it is all there is to know.

Now it is impossible to conceive a sharper antithesis than that which exists at all points between the two theories I have just sketched. The Herakleiteans flatly deny all unity and rest, the Eleatics as flatly deny all plurality and motion. If then either of these schools is entirely right, the law of contradiction is peremptory—the other must be entirely wrong. Is then either entirely right or wrong?

We have already admitted that Herakleiteanism presents us with a most significant truth, and also that it remorselessly sweeps away all basis of knowledge. Therefore we conclude that, though Herakleitos has given us a truth, it is an incomplete and one-sided truth. Let us notice next how the Eleatics stand in this respect.

About the inestimable value of the Eleatic contribution there can be no doubt. Granted that the phenomena The world as it appears to our senses, as opposed to the world as it truly is in itself. of the material world are ever fleeting and vanishing and can never be known—what of that? The material world does not really exist: it is not there that we must seek for the object of knowledge, but in the eternally existent Unity. Thus they oppose the object of reason

¹ This sheer opposition of the existent unity to the non-existent plurality led Parmenides to divide his treatise on Nature into two distinct portions, dealing with Truth and Opinion. I am not disposed to contest Dr Jackson’s affirmation that ‘Parmenides, while he denied the real existence of plurality, recognised its apparent existence, and consequently, however little value he might attach to opinion, was bound to take account of it’. That Parmenides was perfectly consistent in embracing the objects of Opinion in his account, I admit. But none the less does his language justify the statements in the text: he emphatically affirms the non-existence of phenomena, and has no care to explain why they appear to exist.