from what Parmenides himself
said that he regarded the ultimate reality of things as material. It
would be a complete mistake to attribute to him a fully developed and
consistent system of idealism. If you had told Parmenides that he was
an idealist, he would not have understood you. The distinction between
materialism and idealism was not then developed. If you had told him,
moreover, that Being is a concept, he would not have understood {51}
you, because the theory of concepts was not developed until the time
of Socrates and Plato. Now it is the function of historical criticism
to insist upon this, to see that later thought is not attributed to
Parmenides. But if this is the function of historical scholarship, it
is equally the function of philosophic insight to seize upon the germs
of a higher thought amid the confused thinking of Parmenides, to see
what he was groping for, to see clearly what he saw only vaguely and
dimly, to make explicit what in him was merely implicit, to exhibit
the true inwardness of his teaching, to separate what is valuable and
essential in it from what is worthless and accidental. And I say that
in this sense the true and essential meaning of Parmenides is his
idealism. I said in the first chapter that philosophy is the movement
from sensuous to non-sensuous thought. I said that it is only with the
utmost difficulty that this movement occurs. And I said that even the
greatest philosophers have sometimes failed herein. In Parmenides we
have the first example of this. He began by propounding the truth that
Being is the essential reality, and Being, as we saw, is a concept.
But Parmenides was a pioneer. He trod upon unbroken ground. He had not
behind him, as we have, a long line of idealistic thinkers to guide
him. So he could not maintain this first non-sensuous thought. He
could not resist the temptation to frame for himself a mental image, a
picture, of Being. Now all mental images and pictures are framed out
of materials supplied to us by the senses. Hence it comes about that
Parmenides pictured Being as a globe-shaped something occupying space.
But this is not the truth of Parmenides. This is simply his failure to
realise {52} and understand his own principle, and to think his own
thought. It is true that his immediate successors, Empedocles and
Democritus, seized upon this, and built their philosophies upon it.
But in doing so they were building upon the darkness of Parmenides,
upon his d