orous buzzings, and the
chattering tongue. 'Tis by Reason that thou must in lengthened trial
judge what I shall say to thee."

[94]

Thus, like Xenophanes, Parmenides draws a deep division between the
world of reason and the world of sensation, between probative argument
and the guess-work of sense-impressions. The former is the world of
Being, the world of that which truly is, self-existent, uncreated,
unending, unmoved, unchanging, ever self-poised and self-sufficient,
like a sphere. [98] Knowledge is of this, and of this only, and as
such, knowledge is identical with its object; for outside this known
reality there is nothing. In other words, Knowledge can only be of
that which is, and that which is alone can know. All things which
mortals have imagined to be realities are but words; as of the birth
and death of things, of things which were and have ceased to be, of
here and there, of now and then.

It is obvious enough that in all this, and in much more to the same
effect reiterated throughout the poem, we have no more than a
statement, in various forms of negation, of the inconceivability by
human reason of that passage from _being_ as such, to that world of
phenomena which is now, but was not before, {36} and will cease to
be,--from _being_ to _becoming_, from eternity to time, from the
infinite to the finite (or, as Parmenides preferred to call it, from
the perfect to the imperfect, the definite to the indefinite). In all
this Parmenides was not contradicting such observed facts as
generation, or motion, or life, or death; he was talking of a world
which has nothing to do with observation; he was endeavouring to grasp
what was assumed or necessarily implied as a prior condition of
observation, or of a world to observe.

What he and his school seem to have felt was that there was a danger in
all this talk of water or air or other material symbol, or even of the
_indefinite_ or _characterless_ as the original of all,--the danger,
namely, that one should lose sight of the idea of law, of rationality,
of eternal self-centred force, and so be carried away by some vision of
a gradual process of evolution from mere emptiness to fulness of being.
Such a position would be not dissimilar to that of many would-be
metaphysicians among evolutionists, who, not content with the doctrine
of evolution as a theory in science, an ordered and organising view of
observed facts, will try to elevate it into a vision of what