What he and his school seem to have felt was that there was a danger in all
this talk of water or air or other material symbol, or even of the
indefinite or characterless as the original of all,—the danger,
namely, that one should lose sight of the idea of law, of rationality, of
eternal self-centred force, and so be carried away by some vision of a
gradual process of evolution from mere emptiness to fulness of being.
Such a position would be not dissimilar to that of many would-be
metaphysicians among evolutionists, who, not content with the doctrine of
evolution as a theory in science, an ordered and organising view of observed
facts, will try to elevate it into a vision of what is, and alone is, behind
the observed facts. They fail to see that the more blind, the more
accidental, so to speak, the process of differentiation may be; the more it
is shown that the struggle for existence drives the wheels of progress along
the lines of least resistance by the most commonplace of mechanical
necessities, in the same proportion must a law be posited behind all this
process, a reason in nature which gathers up the beginning and the ending.
The protoplasmic cell which the imagination of evolutionists places at the
beginning of time as the starting-point of this mighty process is not merely
this or that, has not merely this or that quality or possibility, it is;
and in the power of that little word is enclosed a whole world of thought,
which is there at the first, remains there all through the evolutions of the
protoplasm, will be there when these are done, is in fact independent of
time and space, has nothing to do with such distinctions, expresses rather
their ultimate unreality.
A History of Greek Philosophy /
THE ELEATICS /
PARMENIDES
