eaching. For there Xenophanes remained and founded a
school, so that he and his successors received the name of Eleatics.
His date is uncertain; but he seems to have been contemporary with
Anaximander [80] and Pythagoras, and to have had some knowledge of the
doctrine of both. He wrote in various poetic measures, using against
the poets, and especially against Homer and Hesiod, their own weapons,
to [83] denounce their anthropomorphic theology. If oxen {32} or lions
had hands, he said, they would have fashioned gods after their likeness
which would have been as [85] authentic as Homer's. As against these
poets, and the popular mythology, he insisted that God must be one,
eternal, incorporeal, without beginning or ending. [87] As Aristotle
strikingly expresses it, "He looked forth over the whole heavens and
said that God is one, [88] that that which is one is God." The
favourite antitheses of his time, the definite and the indefinite,
movable and immovable, change-producing and by change produced--these
and such as these, he maintained, were inapplicable to the eternally
and [86] essentially existent. In this there was no partition of
organs or faculties, no variation or shadow of turning; the Eternal
Being was like a sphere, everywhere equal; everywhere self-identical.

[84]

His proof of this was a logical one; the absolutely self-existent could
not be thought in conjunction with attributes which either admitted any
external influencing Him, or any external influenced by Him. The
prevailing dualism he considered to be, as an ultimate theory of the
universe, unthinkable and therefore false. Outside the Self-existent
there could be no second self-existent, otherwise each would be
conditioned by the existence of the other, and the Self-existent would
be gone. Anything different from the Self-existent must be of the
non-existent, _i.e._ must be nothing.

{33}

One can easily see in these discussions some adumbration of many
theological or metaphysical difficulties of later times, as of the
origin of evil, of freewill in man, of the relation of the created
world to its Creator. If these problems cannot be said to be solved
yet, we need not be surprised that Xenophanes did not solve them. He
was content to emphasise that which seemed to him to be necessary and
true, that God was God, and not either a partner with, or a function
of, matter.

[89]

At the same time he recognised a world of phenomena, or, as