ny the existence of
the world. What he denies is the truth of existence. What he means is:
certainly there is motion and multiplicity; certainly the world is
here, is present to our senses, but it is not the true world. It is
{61} not reality. It is mere appearance, illusion, an outward show and
sham, a hollow mask which hides the real being of things. You may ask
what is meant by this distinction between appearance and reality. Is
not even an appearance real? It appears. It exists. Even a delusion
exists, and is therefore a real thing. So is not the distinction
between appearance and reality itself meaningless? Now all this is
perfectly true, but it does not comprehend quite what is meant by the
distinction. What is meant is that the objects around us have
existence, but not self-existence, not self-substantiality. That is to
say, their being is not in themselves, their existence is not grounded
in themselves but is grounded in another, and flows from that other.
They exist, but they are not independent existences. They are rather
beings whose being flows into them from another, which itself is
self-existent and self-substantial. They are, therefore, mere
appearances of that other, which is the reality. Of course the
Eleatics did not speak of appearance and reality in these terms. But
this is what they were groping for, and dimly saw.

If we now look back upon the road on which we have travelled from the
beginning of Greek philosophy, we shall be able to characterize the
direction in which we have been moving. The earliest Greek
philosophers, the Ionics, propounded the question, "what is the
ultimate principle of things?" and answered it by declaring that the
first principle of things is matter. The second Greek School, the
Pythagoreans, answered the same question by declaring numbers to be
the first principle. The third school, the Eleatics, answered the
question by asserting that the first principle of things is Being.
{62} Now the universe, as we know it, is both quantitative and
qualitative. Quantity and quality are characteristics of every
sense-object. These are not, indeed, the only characteristics of the
world, but they are the only characteristics which have so far come to
light. Now the position of the Ionics was that the ultimate reality is
both quantitative and qualitative, that is to say, it is matter, for
matter is just what has both quantity and quality. The Pythagoreans
abstracted from the quality of t