Christianity and Greek Philosophy / or, the relation between spontaneous and reflective thought in Greece and the positive teaching of Christ and His Apostles

by B. F. Cocker

[Footnote 500: ][ (return) ] Ibid., §§ 39, 87.

[Footnote 501: ][ (return) ] Ibid., § 87.

[Footnote 502: ][ (return) ] "Republic," bk. i. ch. xii.

2. The second theory is that which denies the existence (except as phantasms, images, or mere illusions of the mind) of the whole of sensible phenomena, and refers all knowledge to the rational apperception of unity (τὸ ἔν) or the One.

This was the doctrine of the later Eleatics. The world of sense was, to Parmenides and Zeno, a blank negation, the non ens. The identity of thought and existence was the fundamental principle of their philosophy.

"Thought is the same thing as the cause of thought;

For without the thing in which it is announced,

You can not find the thought; for there is nothing, nor shall be,

Except the existing." [⁵⁰³]

[Footnote 503: ][ (return) ] Parmenides, quoted in Lewes's "Biog. History of Philosophy," p. 54.