e says:
"Parmenides seems to hold by a Unity in thought, Melissus by a Material
unity. Hence the first {48} defined the One as limited, the second
declared it to be unlimited. Xenophanes made no clear statement on
this question; he simply, gazing up to the arch of heaven, declared,
The One is God."

But the difference between Melissus and his master can hardly be said
to be a difference of doctrine; point for point, they are identical.
The difference is a difference of vision or mental picture as to this
mighty All which is One. Melissus, so to speak, places himself at the
centre of this Universal being, and sees it stretching out infinitely,
unendingly, in space and in time. Its oneness comes to him as the
_sum_ of these infinities. Parmenides, on the other hand, sees all
these endless immensities as related to a centre; he, so to speak,
enfolds them all in the grasp of his unifying thought, and as thus
equally and necessarily related to a central unity he pronounces the
All a sphere, and therefore limited. The two doctrines, antithetical
in terms, are identical in fact. The absolutely unlimited and the
absolutely self-limited are only two ways of saying the same thing.

This difference of view or vision Aristotle in the passage quoted
expresses as a difference between _thought_ ((Greek) _logos_) and
_matter_ ((Greek) _hule_). This is just a form of his own radical
distinction between Essence and Difference, Form and Matter, of which
much will be said later on. It is like the difference {49} between
Deduction and Induction; in the first you start from the universal and
see within it the particulars; in the second you start from the
particulars and gather them into completeness and reality in a
universal. The substance remains the same, only the point of view is
different. To put the matter in modern mathematical form, one might
say, The universe is to be conceived as a _sphere_ (Parmenides) of
_infinite radius_ (Melissus). Aristotle is not blaming Melissus or
praising Parmenides. As for Xenophanes, Aristotle after his manner
finds in him the potentiality of both. He is prior both to the process
of thought from universal to particular, and to that from particular to
universal. He does not argue at all; his function is Intuition. "He
looks out on the mighty sky, and says, The One is God."

Melissus applied the results of his analysis in an interesting way to
the question already raised by his predecess