A History of Greek Philosophy / THE ELEATICS / PARMENIDES

Page 5

But while in so far as there was union in the production of man or any other creature, the presiding genius might be symbolised as Love; on the other hand, since this union was a union of opposites (Light and Dark), Discord or Strife also had her say in the union. Thus the nature and character in every creature was the resultant of two antagonistic forces, and depended for its particular excellence or defect on the proportions in which these two elements—the light and the dark, the fiery and the earthy—had been commingled.

No character in Greek antiquity, at least in the succession of philosophic teachers, held a more honoured position than Parmenides. He was looked on with almost superstitious reverence by his fellow-countrymen. Plato speaks of him as his “Father Parmenides,” whom he “revered and honoured more than all the other philosophers together.” To quote Professor Jowett in his introduction to Plato’s dialogue Parmenides, he was “the founder of idealism and also of dialectic, or in modern phraseology, of metaphysics and of logic.”

Of the logical aspect of his teaching we shall see a fuller exemplification in his pupil and successor Zeno; of his metaphysics, by way of summing up what has been already said, it may be remarked that its substantial excellence consists in the perfect clearness and precision with which Parmenides enunciated as fundamental in any theory of the knowable universe the priority of Existence itself, not in time merely or chiefly, but as a condition of having any problem to inquire into.

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