§ 4
Even before the days of Herakleitos the torch of philosophic inquiry had been borne from the coasts of Ionia to the West by Xenophanes of Kolophon who in a life of adventure had wandered as far as Southern Italy and Sicily. For his fiery temperament the most subtle reflection was turned into life and experience, and the one enduring source of Being to which he ever directed his gaze became the universal Divinity that is all perception and thought, that tirelessly embraces all things in its thought and intelligence, and, without beginning or end, perpetually remains the same with itself. What Xenophanes had to say about this God which for him is the same as the world, became the basis for the elaborated doctrine of the Eleatic school which, in declared opposition to Herakleitos,[25] denied all possibility of movement, becoming, alteration, division of the One into Many, to the one absolute Being that completely and entirely occupies Space, is raised [372] above all development, whether temporal or spatial, and remains perpetually enclosed in itself in absolute self-sufficiency.
For this view the whole multiplicity of things that presses itself upon sense-perception is an illusion. Deceptive also is the apparent existence of a multiplicity of animated beings, just as the whole of nature is an illusion. It was not “Nature”, the content of actual experience, that provided the starting-point of the philosophy of Parmenides. Without any assistance from experience, simply by the pure logical deductions to be made from a single fundamental concept (that of “Being”), which was to be grasped only by the understanding, this philosophy claimed to arrive at the whole content of its teaching. For the philosophic scientists of Ionia the soul also had been a part of nature and the science of the soul a department of the science of nature; and this inclusion of the psychical within the physical was the peculiarity in their doctrine of the soul which distinguished it from the ordinary popular psychology. When, however, the whole of Nature was to be ruled out of account as a subject of scientific knowledge, the derivation of psychology from physiology had to be given up as well. These aphysici[26] were logically debarred from holding any doctrine of the soul.
With a complaisance that is remarkable in view of the uncompromising logical vigour with which they deduced their main theory and based it on abstract, super-sensual knowledge, the Eleatics conceded so much at least to the region of appearance and the pressure of sense-perception that, although they did not deduce from their own fundamental conceptions a physical theory of multifarious appearance and its development, yet, side by side with their rigid doctrine of being, in unjustified and unjustifiable relation with it, they did in fact put forward such a theory. Xenophanes, himself, had already in the same way offered a physical theory of limited and relative validity. Parmenides in the second part of his doctrinal poem, developed, “in deceptive adornment of words,” not an authoritative statement of the true nature of being, but “human opinions” of becoming and creation in the world of multiplicity. This, too, must be the standpoint of the physiological doctrines put forward by Zeno of Elea, the boldest dialectician who upheld the doctrine of the motionless All-One. In the course of such a physiology, and with the same implied reservations, the Eleatic philosophers dealt also with the nature and origin of the soul. Their physical doctrine was framed entirely on the lines of the older type of [373] natural philosophy, and they regarded the relation of the spiritual to the corporeal from exactly the same point of view as their predecessors had done. For Parmenides (146 ff, Mull. = fr. 16 Diels) the mind (νόος) of man depends for its existence upon the mixture of two ingredients of which everything, including its body, is composed. These ingredients are the “Light” and the “Night” (the Warm and the Cold, Fire and Earth). What is intellectually active is, even in mankind, the “nature of his limbs”; the character of his thought is determined by the one of the two elements which preponderates in the individual. Even the dead man (because he still has a body) has feeling and sensation; but these powers are deserted by the warm and the fiery and given over to the cold, the dark, and silence. All that is has some capacity of knowledge.[27]—It would be impossible to condemn the “soul” to corporeality more completely than is here done by the bold philosopher of abstract Reason, who at the same time denied so unconditionally all validity to sense-perception. The soul is evidently no longer an independent substance but a mere resultant of material mixture, a function of elements in composition. For Zeno, too, the “soul” in the same way was an exactly equal mixture of the four elementary properties of matter, the Warm, the Cold, the Dry, and the Wet.[28]
It is, therefore, startling, in the face of these utterances, to find that Parmenides also said about the “soul” that the deity that rules the world “at one time, sends it out of the Invisible into the Visible, and at another time back again”.[29] Here, the soul is no longer a condition arising from the mixture of material elements, but an independent being credited with pre-existence before its entry into the “Visible”, i.e. before its entry into the life of the body, and also with a continued existence after its separation from the realm of visibility—and indeed, with a sojourn, several times repeated, in those two worlds. Did Parmenides distinguish between this independently existing soul and the being that perceives in the mixture of the elements and as mind (νόος) thinks, but whose existence is bound up with the elements and the body they together compose? It is obvious at any rate that in what he says of the psyche, and its alternate life in the visible and the invisible, Parmenides is not speaking as a physiologist, but as an adherent of the Orphic-Pythagorean theosophy. While reserving for himself his knowledge of “Truth” and unalterable Being, he could select as he liked among the “opinions of men” when speaking only hypothetically. In his doctrine as a practical teacher with an ethical purpose [374] in view he preferred to adopt the conceptions of the Pythagoreans with whom he lived in close association.[30]