Eleatic. The eleatic sect was so named after Elea, a city of greater Greece, where Parmenides, Zeno, and Leucippus were born, three famous defenders of the philosophy we are about to discuss.

Xenophanes of Colophon is considered the founder of Eleatism . It is said that he succeeded Telauges, son of Pythagoras, who taught his father’s doctrine in Italy. What is certain is that the Eleatics were sometimes called Pythagoreans .

There was a great schism in the eleatic school that divided it into two sorts of philosophers who retained the same name, but whose principles were as opposed as it was possible for them to be: the ones, losing themselves in abstractions, and elevating the certainty of metaphysical knowledge at the expense of the science of facts, regarded experimental physics and the study of nature as the vain and misleading occupation of a man who, bearing the truth within himself, sought it outside, and deliberately become the perpetual plaything of appearance and phantoms; of this number were Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno. The others, on the contrary, persuaded that there is no truth except in propositions based on the testimony of our senses, and that knowledge of the phenomena of nature is the only true philosophy, gave themselves over entirely to the study of physics; and we find at the head of these the famous names of Leucippus, Democrites, Protagoras, Diagoras, and Anaxarchus. This schism gives us the history of the division of eleatic philosophy into the history of metaphysical Eleatism and history of physical Eleatism .

History of the metaphysical eleatics . Xenophanes lived so long that we do not know in what year to fix his birth. The difference among the historians is twenty olympiads, but it is difficult to find any but the fifty-sixth to satisfy all the given facts. Xenophanes, born in the fifty-sixth olympiad, was able to learn the elements of grammar while Anaximander was flourishing, to enter into the Pythagorean school at the age of twenty-five, profess philosophy until the age of ninety-two, witness the defeat of the Persians at Plataea and Marathon, see the reign of Hiero, have Empedocles as his disciple, attain the beginning of the eighty-first olympiad, and die at the age of one hundred.

Xenophanes had no master. Persecuted in his homeland, he withdrew to Zancle [1] or Catana in Sicily. He was a poet and philosopher. Reduced to extreme indigence, he went to beg bread of Hiero. Asking a tyrant for bread! It would have been even better to sing his verses in the streets; that would have been more honest and more in conformity with the values of the time. Indignant at the fables which Homer and Hesiod had told about the gods, he wrote against those two poets; but the verses of Hesiod and Homer have come down to us, and those of Xenophanes have fallen into oblivion. He fought against the principles of Thales and Pythagoras; he harassed the philosopher Epimenides a bit; he wrote the history of his country; he cast the foundations of a new philosophy in a work entitled On Nature . His disputes with the philosophers of his times also served as fodder for Timon’s bad humor: I mean that the misanthrope rejoiced at them inwardly, although he outwardly appeared angered.

We do not have the Eleatics’ works, and those of the ancients who mentioned their principles are accused of leaving us an inexact and unreliable exposition of them. There is every reason to believe that the Eleatics had the double doctrine. [2] Here is all we have been able to ascertain of their metaphysics and their physics.

Metaphysics of Xenophanes . Nothing is made from nothing. What is has therefore always been; but what is eternal is infinite; what is infinite is one: for where there is dissimilarity there is plurality. What is eternal, infinite, one, everywhere the same, is also immutable and immobile: for if it could change place it would not be infinite, and if it could become something else, there would be in it things that would begin and things that would end without a cause: something would be made of nothing, and nothing from something, which is absurd. There is only one being that is eternal, infinite, one, immutable, immobile, all: and that being is God. God is not a body, yet his substance, extending equally in all directions, fills an immense spherical space. He has nothing in common with man. God sees all, hears all, is present for all; he is at the same time intelligence, duration, nature; he has not our form; he has not our passions; his senses are not as ours.

This system is not far from Spinozism. If Xenophanes seems to recognize two substances, the union of which constitutes a whole, which he calls the universe , on the other hand one of these substances is figurative, and can, according to him, be conceived as distinguished and separate from the other only by abstraction. Their nature is not essentially different; moreover, that soul of the universe that Xenophanes seems to have imagined, and which the philosophers who have followed him have recognized, was nothing of what we understand by a spirit .

Xenophanes’s physics . There is only one universe, but there are an infinite number of worlds. As there is no true motion, there is indeed neither generation, nor wasting away, nor alteration. There is no beginning or end of anything but appearances. Appearances are the only real processions from the state of possibility to the state of existence, and from the state of existence to that of annihilation. The senses cannot raise us to the knowledge of the first reason of the universe. It necessarily fools us about its laws. The only solid science that comes to us is reason; all that is based solely on the testimony of the senses is opinion. Metaphysics is the science of things; physics is the study of appearances. What we perceive in ourselves is; what we perceive outside ourselves appears to us. But the only true philosophy is of things that are, and not of those that appear.

Despite this scorn of the Eleatics for the science of facts and the knowledge of nature, they devoted themselves seriously to it; they simply thought less favorably of it than the philosophers of their time. They would have agreed with the Pyrrhonists on the uncertainty of the report of the senses, but they would have defended against them the infallibility of reason.

There are, said the Eleatics , four elements; they combine to form the earth. The earth is the matter of all beings. Stars are burning clouds; these masses of carbon are extinguished in the daytime and light up at night. The Sun is a mass of igneous particles which self-destructs and reforms in 24 hours; it rises in the morning like a great brazier ignited by recent vapors; these vapors are consumed as its course progresses; in the evening it falls exhausted to earth. Its motion takes place in a straight line; it is distance that gives the space it covers an apparent curvature. There are several Suns; each climate, each zone has its own. The Moon is a condensed cloud; it is inhabited; there are regions and cities. Mists are only exhalations which the Sun attracts from the surface of the earth; is it the influence of the mixtures that precipitate into the seas that salts them? The seas once covered the whole earth: this phenomenon is proven by the presence of marine bodies on its surface and in its bowels. Humankind will end when, the earth being sucked to the bottom of the seas, that mass of water will be equally distributed everywhere, soak the globe, and make it all into a quagmire; centuries will pass, the immense quagmire will dry up, and men will be reborn. This is the great revolution of all beings.

Let us not lose sight, amidst these puerilities, of several ideas that are not beneath the philosophy of our times: the distinction of the elements, their combination, whence results the earth; the earth, general principle of bodies; the circular appearance, the effect of great distance; the plurality of worlds and Suns; the inhabited Moon; the clouds formed from terrestrial exhalations; the presence of the sea over all points of the earth’s surface. It was improbable that a science which was just at the alphabet stage would happen upon a greater number of verities or fruitful ideas.

Such was the state of the eleatic philosophy when Parmenides was born. He was from Elea. He had Zeno as disciple. He conversed with Socrates. He wrote his philosophy in verse; all we have of it is fragments so detached that no coherent whole can be made of them. It would seem that he too gave the preference to reason over the senses; that he regarded physics as the science of opinions, and metaphysics as the science of things, and left speculative Eleatism where it was; unless we choose to rely on Plato, and attribute all that Platonism has since put forth about ideas to Parmenides. Parmenides made for himself a particular system of physics. He considered cold and hot, or earth and fire, as the principles of beings; he discovered that the Sun and the Moon shone with the same light, but that the brightness of the Moon was borrowed; he placed the earth at the center of the world; he attributed its immobility to its equal distance in all directions from each of the other points of the universe. To explain the generation of substances that surround us, he said that fire was applied to the earth, the alluvium warmed, man and all that has life was born; the world will end; the principal portion of the human soul is placed in the heart.

Parmenides was born in the sixty-ninth olympiad. The time of his death is not known. The Eleans called him to govern, but popular disruptions soon turned him from public affairs, and he retired to devote himself entirely to philosophy.

Melissus of Samos flourished in the eight-fourth olympiad. He was a statesman before he was a philosopher. It would perhaps have been more advantageous for the people if he had been a philosopher first before he was a statesman. From his retreat he wrote On being and On nature . He changed nothing in the philosophy of his predecessors, only he believed that, the nature of the gods being incomprehensible, we must remain silent about them; and that what is not, is impossible: two principles, the first of which shows much restraint and the second much boldness. It is believed that it was our philosopher who was commanding the Samians when their fleet defeated that of the Athenians.

Zeno the eleatic was a handsome fellow whom Parmenides did not accept into his school without some reproaches. He also participated in public affairs before he applied himself to the study of philosophy. It is said he was in Agrigente when that city was suffering under the tyranny of Phalaris; that having invoked all the resources of philosophy to assuage that ferocious beast, he inspired in the youths the honest and dangerous design of delivering themselves of him; that Phalaris, learning of this conspiracy, had Zeno seized and exposed him to the cruelest torture in the hope that the violence of pain would get him to reveal the names of his accomplices; that the philosopher named no one but the tyrant’s favorite; that amidst torture his eloquence awakened the Agrigentines; that they were ashamed of not defending themselves while a foreigner was dying before their eyes for undertaking to end their slavery; that they suddenly rose up, and the tyrant was stoned. Some add that after inviting Phalaris to approach on the pretext of revealing to him everything he wanted to know, he bit him on the ear and let him go only as he died under the blows of the executioners. Others that, to deny Phalaris all hope of learning all about the conspiracy, he cut out his own tongue with his teeth and spat it in the tyrant’s face. But whatever honor philosophy could obtain from these facts, we cannot hide the uncertainty from ourselves. Zeno lived under neither Phalaris nor Dionysius, and the same things are told about Anaxarchus. [3]

Zeno was a great dialectician. He had divided his logic into three parts. In the first he dealt with the art of reasoning; in the second, the art of dialogue, and in the third the art of disputation. He had no metaphysics other than that of Xenophanes. He argued against the reality of motion. Everyone knows his sophism about the tortoise and Achilles. He said, “If I suffer the wicked man’s offense without indignation, I will be insensitive to the honest man’s praise.” His physics was the same as that of Parmenides. He denied the void. If he added humid and dry to cold and hot, it was not really as four different principles, but as four effects of two causes, earth and water.

History of the Eleatic physicists . Leucippus of Abdera, a disciple of Melissus and Zeno and master of Democritus, early perceived that excessive distrust of the testimony of the senses destroyed all philosophy, and that it was better to find out in what circumstances they deceive us than to persuade ourselves and others by the subtleties of logic that they always do so. He turned away from the metaphysics of Xenophanes, the ideas of Plato, the numbers of Pythagoras, and the sophisms of Zeno, and devoted himself entirely to the study of nature, the knowledge of the universe, and research on the properties and attributes of beings. The only means, he said, of reconciling the senses with reason, which seemed to have parted ways from the start of the eleatic sect, is to collect facts and make them into the basis of speculation. Without facts, all the systematic ideas bear on nothing: they are inconstant shadows that are what they are only for an instant.

We can consider Leucippus as the founder of corpuscular philosophy. Not that before him bodies had not been considered as a mass of particles; but he was the first to make the combination of particles the universal cause of all things. He had taken such an aversion to metaphysics that, in order to leave nothing arbitrary in his philosophy, he said, he had banished from it the name of God. The philosophers who had preceded him saw everything in ideas; Leucippus wanted to allow only what he could observe in bodies. He made everything emanate from the atom, from its figure and its motion. He imagined atomism; Democritus perfected this system; Epicurus carried it as high as it could go. See Atomism.

Leucippus and Democritus had said that atoms differed by motion, figure, and mass, and that it was from their coordination that all beings were born. Epicurus added that there were atoms of such heterogeneous nature that they could neither meet nor combine. Leucippus and Democritus had argued that all elementary molecules had at first moved in a straight line. Epicurus noted that if they had all begun to move in a straight line, they would never have changed direction, would never have met, and would never have produced any substance; whence he concluded that they had moved in directions angled toward each other, and converging toward some common point, something like the way we see objects with weight fall toward the center of the earth. Leucippus and Democritus had animated their atoms with a single force of gravitation. Epicurus had his gravitate variously. Those are the principal differences of the philosophies of Leucippus and Epicurus that we know about.

Leucippus further said that the universe is infinite. There is an absolute void and an absolute full; these are the two portions of space in general. Atoms move in the void. Everything is made of their combinations. They form worlds that resolve into atoms. Ferried about a common center, they meet, impact, separate, join; the lightest are hurled into empty spaces, which outside embrace the general vortex. The others tend strongly toward the center: they hasten, hurtle, latch on, and there form a mass that constantly increases in density. This mass attracts to itself everything that approaches; from this arise the humid, the slimy, the hot, the burning, the flaming, the waters, the earth, the stones, the men, the fire, the flame, the stars. The Sun is surrounded with a large atmosphere, which is exterior to it. It is motion that ceaselessly maintains the fire of the stars, by carrying to the place they occupy particles that replace the losses they sustain. The Moon shines only from the borrowed light of the Sun. The Sun and the Moon suffer eclipses because the earth tilts toward the south. If lunar eclipses are more frequent than solar ones, the difference must be sought in the difference of their orbits. Generations, losses, alterations are the consequences of a general and necessary law that acts in all the molecules of matter.

Although we have lost Leucippus’s works, we do have, as you see, enough knowledge of the principles of his philosophy to judge the merit of some of our modern systematics; and we could ask the Cartesians whether it is very far from the ideas of Leucippus to those of Descartes. See Cartesianism.

The successor of Leucippus was Democritus, one of antiquity’s premier geniuses. Democritus was born in Abdera, where his family was rich and powerful. He flourished at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. With the design he had formed to travel, he left the landed property to his brothers and took in money his share of his father’s succession. He travelled in Egypt, where he learned geometry in the seminars; in Chaldea, in Ethiopia, where he conversed with the gymnosophists; in Persia, where he questioned the magi; in the Indies, etc. I have spared nothing in order to learn , said Democritus; I have seen all the famous men of my time; I have surveyed all the regions where I hoped to encounter truth. The distance of places did not deter me; I have observed the differences of several climates; I have collected the phenomena of the air, the earth, and the waters. The fatigue of travelling has not kept me from meditating; I have cultivated mathematics on the highways as in the silence of my study; I do not believe anyone surpasses me today in the art of demonstrating by numbers and lines, not excepting the priests of Egypt .

Democritus returned to his country filled with the wisdom of all nations, but there he was reduced to the narrowest and most obscure of lives. His long travels had entirely exhausted his fortune; fortunately, he found the help he needed in the friendship of his brother Damasis. The laws of the land refused the sepulcher to anyone who had dissipated the fortune of his fathers. Democritus did not believe he should expose his memory to this affront: he obtained a considerable sum in silver from the republic, with a bronze statue, for a single reading of one of his works. Subsequently, having conjectured through meteorological observations that there would be a great shortage of oil, he purchased all the oil available cheaply, sold it at a high price, and proved to philosophy’s detractors that the philosopher was able to acquire wealth when it suited him. His compatriots called him to the administration of the public business; he conducted himself at the head of the government as was expected of a man of his character. But his dominant taste soon was calling him back to contemplation and philosophy. He lost himself in wild and solitary places; he wandered among tombs; he devoted himself to the study of ethics, nature, anatomy, and mathematics; he consumed his life in experiments; he dissolved stones; he pressed out the juices of plants; he dissected animals. His idiotic compatriots called him by turns a magician or a madman. His interview with Hippocrates, who had been called to cure him, is too well known and too uncertain for me to mention it here. His labors and his extreme sobriety did not shorten his days. He lived almost a century. Here are the general principles of his philosophy.

The logic of Democritus. Democritus said there exist only atoms and the void; the rest must be treated as deceitful simulacra. Man is far from the truth. Each of us has his opinion; none possesses science. There are two philosophies: the one sensible, the other rational; we must stick to the first for as long as we sense, hear, taste, and touch; we must pursue the phenomenon with acuteness of mind only when it escapes the grasp of the senses. The experimental path is long, but it is sure; the path of reasoning has the same flaw, but has not the same certainty.

Whence we see that Democritus had moved a little closer to the ideas of Xenophanes in metaphysics, and had yielded unreservedly to the method of philosophizing of Leucippus in physics.

The physiology of Democritus. Democritus said nothing is made of nothing: the void and atoms are the efficient causes of everything. Matter is an agglomerate of atoms, or is only a vain appearance. The atom is not born of the void, nor the void of the atom; bodies exist in the void. They differ only by the combination of their elements. Space must be related to atoms and to the void. All that is full is atom; all that is not atom is void. The void and atoms are two infinites, one in number, the other in extension. Atoms have two primitive properties, shape and mass. The shape varies infinitely; the mass is the smallest possible. All we attribute to atoms as properties, moreover, is in us. They move in the immense void where there is neither up nor down, neither beginning, nor middle, nor end; this motion has always been and will never cease. It occurs according to one oblique direction, like that of things with weight. Collision and cohesion are consequences of this obliqueness and of the diversity of shapes. Justice, destiny, providence are terms devoid of meaning. The reciprocal actions of the atoms are the sole eternal reason for everything. Circular motion is its immediate effect. Matter is one: all the differences emanate from order, shape, and the combination of atoms. Generation is only the cohesion of homogenous atoms; alteration is but an accident of their combination; corruption is but their separation; augmentation but an addition of atoms; diminution but a subtraction of atoms. What is perceived by the senses is always true; the doctrine of atoms accounts for all the diversity of our sensations. Worlds are infinite in number; some are perfect, some imperfect, some alike, some different. The spaces they occupy, the limits that circumscribe them, and the intervals that separate them, vary infinitely. Some form themselves, others are formed; others dissipate or destroy themselves. The world has no soul, or the soul of the world is igneous motion. Fire is an aggregate of spherical atoms. There are no differences between the constitutive atoms of air, water, or earth, except that of the masses. Stars are aggregates of igneous and light corpuscles, moved about themselves. The moon has its mountains, its valleys, and its plains. The sun is an immense globe of fire. Heavenly bodies are swept in a general motion from east to west. The closer their orbit is to the earth, the slower it moves. Comets are agglomerates of planets so close together that they only create the sensation of a whole. If too great a quantity of atoms is compressed into too small a space, a current will be formed; if on the contrary the atoms are dispersed into a void too big for their quantity, they will remain at rest. In the beginning, the earth was swept through the immensity of space with an irregular motion. In time it acquired consistency and weight; its motion slowed gradually, then ceased. The earth owes its repose to its extent and its gravity. It is a vast disk that divides infinite space into two hemispheres, one upper and the other lower. It remains immobile through the equality of force of these two hemispheres. If one considers the section of universal space relative to two determined points of that space, it will be straight or oblique. It is in this sense that the axis of the earth is inclined. The earth is full of water; it is the unequal distribution of this fluid in its immense and profound concavities that causes and maintains its motions. The seas shrink constantly, and will dry up. Men emerged from the alluvium and water. The human soul is only the warmth of the elements of the body; it is through this warmth that man moves and lives. The soul is mortal; it dissipates with the body. The part that resides in the heart reflects, thinks, and wills; that which is spread uniformly elsewhere only senses. The motion which engendered destroyed beings will form them anew. Animals, men, and gods, each have their own senses. Ours are mirrors that receive the images of things. All sensation is only touch. The distinction of day and night is a natural expression of time.

The theology of Democritus . There are natures composed of very subtle atoms which we can perceive only in the dark. They are gigantic simulacra: their dissolution is difficult and rarer than with other natures. These beings have voices; they are better informed than we are. There are in the future events they can foresee, and reveal to us; some are beneficial, others harmful. They inhabit vague spaces; they have a human shape. Their dimension can extend to filling immense spaces. Whence we see that Democritus had taken as real beings the phantoms of his imagination, and that he had composed his theology from his own visions, which happened in his time to many others, who had no suspicion of it.

The ethics of Democritus . The health of the body and repose of the soul are man’s sovereign good. The wise man does not attach himself to anything that can be taken from him. We must be consoled for what is by the contemplation of the possible. The philosopher will ask for nothing, and deserve everything; will never be surprised and often make himself admire. It is the law that makes good and evil, just and unjust, the decent and the dishonest. Knowledge of the necessary is more to be desired than enjoyment of the superfluous. Education makes more good people than nature does. One must not pursue fortune except to the point indicated by the needs of nature. We will spare ourselves many pains and undertakings if we know our strengths, and if we strive for nothing more, either domestically or in society. He who has established a role knows everything that will happen to him. The laws deprive of freedom only those who would abuse it. No one is under misfortune as long as he is far from injustice; the wicked man who ignores the final dissolution, and who is aware of his wickedness, lives in fear, dies in a trance, and cannot prevent himself from expecting from an ulterior justice which is not, what he has merited from that which is, and from which he knows he is escaping by dying. Good health is in the hands of man. Intemperance provides short joys and long pleasures, etc.

Democritus took Protagoras, one of his compatriots, as his disciple; he took him from the position of porter to raise him to that of philosopher. Democritus having considered with a mechanic’s eyes the singular artifice that Protagoras had thought up for carrying a great load conveniently, questioned him, conceived based on his replies a good opinion of his mind, and took him on. Protagoras professed eloquence and philosophy. He asked a high price for his lessons; he wrote a book on the nature of the gods which earned him the name impious and exposed him to persecutions. His work began with these words: I do not know whether there are gods; the depth of this research combined with the shortness of life have condemned me never to know this . Protagoras was banished, and his books sought, burned, and read. Punitis ingeniis gliscit auctoritas. [4]

There is nothing special about that part of his philosophy that has come down to us: it is the metaphysics of Xenophanes and the physics of Democritus.

Eleatics . Diagoras of the island of Melos was another impious one. He was born in the 38 ^th olympiad. The disorders he observed in the physical and moral order caused him to deny the existence of the gods. He did not contain his manner of thinking, despite the dangers to which he exposed himself by allowing it to get out. The government put a price on his head. They raised a column of bronze by which they promised a talent to his killer and two talents to whoever caught him alive. One of his imprudences was having taken, for want of any other wood, a statue of Hercules to cook some turnips with. When the ship that carried him far from his own country was greeted by a violent tempest, the sailors, superstitious persons when in danger, began to blame themselves for taking him on board, but the philosopher, showing them other ships that were running no less danger than theirs, asked them with great composure whether each of those ships also was carrying a Diagoras. He said in another conjuncture to a Samothracian friend of his who was pointing out to him, in a temple of Neptune, a large number of ex votos  [5] offered to the god by travelers he had saved from shipwreck, that the priests would not be so proud if they had been able to keep a register of the prayers of all the good souls Neptune had allowed to drown. Our atheist gave good laws to the Mantinians, and died tranquilly in Corinth.

Anaxarchus of Abdera was more famous because of his moral license than for his works. He enjoyed all the favor of Alexander; he applied himself to corrupting the young prince with flattery. He succeeded in rendering him impervious to truth. He was base enough to console him for the murder of Cleitus. An ignoras, he told him, jus et fas Jovi assidere, ut quidquid rex agat, id fas justumque putetur.  [6] He had long solicited from Alexander the demise of the tyrant of the island of Cyprus, Nicocreon. A tempest cast him into the hands of that dangerous enemy. Alexander was gone. Nicocreon had Anaxarchus pounded in a mortar. The poor bloke died with a firmness worthy of a better man. He cried out under the blows of the pestle: Anaxarchi culeum, non Anaxarchum tundis.  [7] They also say of him that he cut out his tongue with his teeth and spat it in the tyrant’s face. [8]

1. Later called Messina.

2. One “exoteric” for the general public; one “esoteric” for initiates.

3. Diderot will end this article with this same story told about Anaxarchus.

4. “When men of talents are punished, authority is strengthened” (Tacitus, Annals , book IV, 435).

5. A plaque thanking the god – a practice, not incidentally, also common in Catholic churches.

6. “Are you not aware that it is set down that the law and right of Jupiter is that whatever the king does is held to be right and just.”

7. “You are just pounding the container of Anaxarchus, you are not pounding Anaxarchus” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives , IX, 10); but also rendered by R. D. Hicks as coming from Nicocreon himself: “Pound, pound the pouch containing Anaxarchus; ye pound not Anaxarchus.”

8. This is the story told about Zeno earlier.