INTRODUCTION.

to the object of sensation. This is good, so far as it goes: it points to the line followed by Plato, who said, if material nature cannot be known, the inference is, not that knowledge is impossible, but that there is some immaterial existence, transcending the material, which is the true object of knowledge. But the further we examine the Eleatic The Eleatics were a school of philosophers in Magna Graecia (southern Italy) who argued that reality is a single, unchanging substance. solution, the more reason we shall see to be dissatisfied with it. First the problem of the material world is not answered but merely shelved by the negation of its existence. Here are we, a number of conscious intelligences, who perceive, or fancy we perceive, a nature which is not ourselves. What then are we, what is this nature, why do we seem to perceive it, and how can there be interaction between us and it? A bald negation of matter will not satisfy these difficulties. Again, the Eleatics are bound to deny not merely the plurality of objects, but the plurality of subjects as well. What then are these conscious personalities, which seem so real and so separate, and which yet on Eleatic principles must, so far as their plurality and their separation is concerned, be an idle dream? Secondly, if we ask Parmenides Parmenides of Elea (c. 5th century BCE) was the leading figure of the Eleatic school. what is this eternally existent One, no satisfactory answer is forthcoming. On the one hand his description of the One Being All original: "ἓν ὂν πᾶν" (hen on pan) is clogged with the forms of materiality: it is 'on all sides like unto the globe of a well-rounded sphere, everywhere in equipoise from the centre:' on the other, it is a mere aggregate of negations, and, as Plato has shown, an idle phantom of the imagination, an abstraction without content, whereof nothing can be predicated, which has no possible mode of existence, which cannot be spoken, conceived, or known. This is all Parmenides has to offer us for veritable existence. If it is true that on Herakleitean Referring to Herakleitos of Ephesus, who famously taught that "all things flow." principles nothing can be known, it is equally true that on Eleatic principles there is nothing to know.

The Herakleitean and Eleatic theories are in fact alike incomplete, but potentially complementary one to the other: the fusion of the two is the work left to Plato.

§ 8. How is it then that either of these most opposite theories leads to an equally hopeless deadlock? It is because each of them presents us with one side of a truth as if it were the whole. For opposite as the doctrines of Herakleitos and Parmenides may appear, they are in fact mutually complementary, and neither is actually true except in conjunction with its rival. Herakleitos did well in affirming Motion; but he forgot that, if Motion is to be, there must likewise be Rest: for opposite requires opposite. So too Parmenides in denying plurality saw not that he thereby abolished unity: for One and Many can exist only in mutual correlation—each is meaningless without the other. Both must