Eleats, since all change appeared to be an impossibility,
the phenomena of succession presented by the world were regarded as a
pure illusion, and they asserted that Time, and Motion, and Space are
phantasms of the imagination, or vain deceptions of the senses. They
therefore separated reason from opinion, attributing to the former
conceptions of absolute truth, and to the latter imperfections arising
from the fictions of sense. It was on this principle that Parmenides
divided his work on "Nature" into two books, the first on Reason, the
second on Opinion. Starting from the nature of Being, the uncreated and
unchangeable, he denied altogether the idea of succession in time, and
also the relations of space, and pronounced change and motion, of
whatever kind they may be, mere illusions of opinion. His pantheism
appears in the declaration that the All is thought and intelligence; and
this, indeed, constitutes the essential feature of his doctrine, for, by
thus placing thought and being in parallelism with each other, and
interconnecting them by the conception that it is for the sake of being
that thought exists, he showed that they must necessarily be conceived
of as one.

Such profound doctrines occupied the first book of the poem of
Parmenides; in the second he treated of opinion, which, as we have said,
is altogether dependent on the senses, and therefore untrustworthy, not,
however, that it must necessarily be absolutely false. It is scarcely
possible for us to reconstruct from the remains of his works the details
of his theory, or to show his approach to the Ionian doctrines by the
assumption of the existence in nature of two opposite species--ethereal
fire and heavy night; of an equal proportion of which all things
consist, fire being the true, and night the phenomenal. From such an
unsubstantial and delusive basis it would not repay us, even if we had
the means of accomplishing it, to give an exposition of his physical
system. In many respects it degenerated into a wild vagary; as, for
example, when he placed an overruling daemon in the centre of the
phenomenal world. Nor need we be detained by his extravagant
reproduction of the old doctrine of the generation of animals from miry
clay, nor follow his explanation of the nature of man, who, since he is
composed of light and darkness, participates in both, and can never
ascertain absolute truth. By other routes, and upon far less fanciful
principles, modern philosophy