"Another light that shines in revolution round the earth by night.
"Forever gazing at the radiant sun.
"For as the elements are mixed in the jointed framework of our limbs, so are the minds of men made up. For the nature of the members is the same as that which thinks in the case of all and each; it is mind that rules.
"From the right side boys, from the left girls.
"Thus, according to opinion, were born and now are these things; and afterwards, when they have grown to the full, will perish: whereto men have affixed unto each a name."
It is only by a complete translation of the extant fragments of Parmenides that any notion can be formed of the hiatus between what he chose to call truth and what he termed opinion. As a thinker, he revealed both the weakness of his metaphysical system and the sincerity of his intention by proclaiming this abrupt division between the realm of the pure reason and the field of the senses, without attempting a synthesis. No other speculator has betrayed the vanity of dogmatism about the absolute more conclusively by the simultaneous presentation of lame guesses in the region of the relative. The impartial student of his verse is forced to the conclusion that the titles τὰ πρὸς ἀλήθειαν and τὰ πρὸς δόξαν, which have been given to the two departments of his exposition, are both arbitrary; for what warrant have we that his intuitions into the nature of pure being are more certain than his guesses about the conditions of phenomenal existence? Parmenides might, indeed, be selected as a parable of the human mind pretending to a knowledge of the unconditioned truth, and, after all, arriving at nothing more cogent than opinion. The innumerable ontological assertions which in the pride of the speculative reason have been made by men are δόξαι; and the epigram pointed by Parmenides against the common folk is equally applicable to his own sect—
Κωφοὶ ὁμῶς τυφλοί τε, τεθηπότες, ἄκριτα φῦλα.
As soon as men begin to dogmatize, whether the supposed truth to which they pin their faith be the barest metaphysical abstraction or some assumed intuition into the divine nature, they create a schism between the multiplicity of the universe and the unity which they proclaim. In other words, they distinguish, like Parmenides, between what they arbitrarily denote as truth and what they cannot account for as phenomena. To quit the sphere of our own mind is impossible; and, therefore, nothing can be discovered which is not some mode of the mind. The utmost the metaphysician can do is to describe the operations of the human intellect without explaining its existence, and all systematized knowledge is but a classification of the categories of consciousness. Thus the sophistic position that man is for man the measure of all things is irrefutable. But when he attempts to hypostasize his own thoughts as realities, to argue outward from his conceptions to the universe, this is the same as taking a leap in the dark across an undefined abyss from the only ascertained standing-ground to a hypothetical beyond.
During the two-and-twenty centuries which have elapsed since the days of Parmenides, the philosophers have learned wisdom. They are now too wary to parade the distinction between two kinds of opinion, and to construct one system of truth, another of illusion. They either content themselves with omitting what they regard as the insoluble, or they endeavor to invent an all-embracing schema, which shall supersede the cruder distinctions between subject and object, mind and nature, ego and non-ego. Yet nothing in the realm of absolute knowledge has been gained in all this space of time.
The owl of Minerva, to quote one of Hegel's most luminous epigrams, still starts upon its flight when the evening twilight, succeeding the day of work, has fallen. Metaphysic goes on shaping from the human consciousness a fabric which it calls reality. Science has magnified and multiplied phenomena until, instead of one, we have in every case a million problems to employ intelligence. Social conditions grow more complex, and more and more is ascertained about the inner life of man. But the fact remains that, while theologian, logician, physicist, and moralist, each from his own standing-point, may cry "Eureka!" we can know nothing in itself. The most complicated system, created by the Aristotle of the modern world, involves at the outset an assumption. From reflection on the laws of human thought, on the varied acquisitions of the human mind, and on the successive phases of human history, it carries over the synthetic statement of its conclusions to the account of the universe. In other words, it postulates the identity of the human and the divine mind, and ends by asserting that thought is the only reality. Does not a fallacy lie in this, that while the mind possesses the faculty of reflecting upon itself, everything which it knows is of necessity expressed in terms of itself, and therefore in pretending to give an account of the universe it is only giving an account of its own operations? The philosophy of the Idée is thus a way of looking at things; to explain them or deduce them is beyond its reach. How, for example, except by exercise of faith, by dogmatism and initial begging of the question, can we be assured that an intelligence differently constituted from the human mind should not cognize a different κόσμος νοητός, or intelligible world, and be equally justified in claiming to have arrived at truth? It is comparatively easy to acquire encyclopædic knowledge, to construct a system, to call the keystone of the system the Idée, and to assert that the Idée is God. But is all this of any value except as a machine for arranging and formulating thoughts and opinions? At the end of philosophies one feels tempted to exclaim: