[49] Xenophan. Fragm. 19, p. 60, ed. Karsten; Cicero, Divinat. i. 3, 5.
[50] Xenophanis Fragment. 34-35, p. 85, ed. Karsten; Aristotel. Rhetoric. ii. 23; Metaphys. A. 5, p. 986, b. 19.
[51] Xenoph. Frag. 1-2, p. 35.
| Οὖλος ὁρᾷ, οὖλος δὲ νοεῖ, οὖλος δε τ’ ἀκούει. |
Plutarch ap. Eusebium, Præp. Evang. i. 8; Diogen. Laert. ix. 19.
His doctrine of Pankosmism, or Pantheism — The whole Kosmos is Ens Unum or God — Ἓν καὶ Πᾶν. Non-Ens inadmissible.
Though Xenophanes thus appears (like Pythagoras) mainly as a religious dogmatist, yet theogony and cosmogony were so intimately connected in the sixth century B.C., that he at the same time struck out a new philosophical theory. His negation of theogony was tantamount to a negation of cosmogony. In substituting one God for many, he set aside all distinct agencies in the universe, to recognise only one agent, single, all-pervading, indivisible. He repudiated all genesis of a new reality, all actual existence of parts, succession, change, beginning, end, etc., in reference to the universe, as well as in reference to God. “Wherever I turned my mind (he exclaimed) everything resolved itself into One and the same: all things existing came back always and everywhere into one similar and permanent nature.”[52] The fundamental tenet of Xenophanes was partly religious, partly philosophical, Pantheism, or Pankosmism: looking upon the universe as one real all-comprehensive Ens, which he would not call either finite or infinite, either in motion or at rest.[53] Non-Ens he pronounced to be an absurdity — an inadmissible and unmeaning phrase.
[52] Timon, fragment of the Silli ap. Sext. Empiric. Hypot. Pyrrh. i. 33, sect. 224.
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ὄππη
γὰρ ἐμὸν νόον εἰρύσαιμι, εἰς ἓν ταὐτό τε πᾶν ἀνελύετο, πᾶν δε ὂν αἰεὶ πάντη ἀνελκόμενον μίαν εἰς φύσιν ἴσταθ’ ὁμοίαν. |
Αἰεὶ here appears to be more conveniently construed with ἴσταθ’ not (as Karsten construes it, p. 118) with ὄν.