presented under a peculiar aesthetic
or sensible law. The senses, it is true, teach us that there are "many
things," but reason affirms that, at bottom, there exists only "the
one." Whatever, therefore, manifests itself in the field of sense is
merely illusory--the mental representation of a phenomenal world, which
to experience seems diversified, but which reason can not possibly admit
to be other than "immovable" and "one." There is but one Being in the
universe, eternal, immovable, absolute; and of this unconditioned being
all phenomenal existences, whether material or mental, are but the
attributes and modes. Hence the two great maxims of the Eleatic school,
derived from Parmenides--ta panta en, "_The All is One_" and to auto
noein te kai einai (Idem est cogitare atque esse), "_Thought and Being
are identical._" The last remarkable dictum is the fundamental principle
of the modern pantheistic doctrine of "absolute identity" as taught by
Schelling and Hegel.[451]

[Footnote 450: Ritter's "History of Ancient Philosophy," vol. i. pp.
447, 451.]

[Footnote 451: Id., ib., vol. i. pp. 450, 455.]

Lewes asserts that "Parmenides did not, with Xenophanes, call 'the One'
God; he called it Being.[452] In support of this statement he, however,
cites no ancient authorities. We are therefore justified in rejecting
his opinion, and receiving the testimony of Simplicius, "the only
authority for the fragments of the Eleatics,"[453] and who had a copy of
the philosophic poems of Parmenides. He assures us that Parmenides and
Xenophanes "affirmed that '_the One,_' or unity, was the first Principle
of all,....they meaning by this One _that highest or supreme God_, as
being the cause of unity to all things.... It remaineth, therefore, that
that _Intelligence_ which is the cause of all things, and therefore of
mind and understanding also, in which all things are comprehended in
unity, was Parmenides' one Ens or Being.[454] Parmenides was, therefore,
a spiritualistic or idealistic Pantheist.

_Zeno of Elea_ (born B.C. 500) was the logician of the Eleatic school.
He was, says Diogenes Laertius, "the inventor of Dialectics."[455] Logic
henceforth becomes the organon[456]--organon of the Eleatics.

[Footnote 452: "Biographical History of Philosophy," p. 50.]

[Footnote 453: Encyclopaedia Britannica, article "Simplicius."]

[Footnote 454: Cudworth's "Intellectual System," vol. i. p. 511.]

[Footnote 455: "Lives," p. 387 (Bohn's editio