dilettanti spiders; while the rhapsodies of the blind singer are living in the brain and heart of thousands and thousands, who go back to them as the fountain-source of poetry, the crystal mirror of an antique world. The world presented itself to Homer in pictures, to Xenophanes in problems. The one saw Nature, enjoyed it, and painted it. The other also saw Nature, but questioned it, and wrestled with it. Every trait in Homer is sunny clear; in Xenophanes there is indecision, confusion. In Homer there is a resonance of gladness, a sense of manifold life, activity, and enjoyment. In Xenophanes there is bitterness, activity of a spasmodic sort, infinite doubt, and infinite sadness. The one was a poet singing as the bird sings, carolling for very exuberance of life; the other was a Thinker, and a fanatic. He did not sing, he recited: "Ah! how unlike To that large utterance of the early Gods!" That the earnest philosopher should have opposed the sunny poet, opposed him even with bitterness, on account of the degraded actions and motives which he attributed to the Gods, is natural; but we must distinguish between this opposition and satire. Xenophanes was bitter, not satirical. The statement derived from Diogenes, that he wrote satires against Homer and Hesiod, is erroneous.* Those who think otherwise are referred to the excellent essay of Victor Cousin, before mentioned, or to Ritter. Rhapsodizing philosophy, and availing himself, for that purpose, of all that philosophers had discovered, he wandered from place to place, and at last came to Elea, where he settled. Hegel questions this: he says he finds no distinct mention of such a fact in any of the ancient writers; on the contrary, Strabo, in his Γέγραφε δὲ καὶ ἐν ἔπεσιν, καὶ ἐλεγείας, καὶ ἰάμβους κατὰ ̔Ησιόδου καὶ ̔Ομήρου. Here, says M. Cousin, the word iápßovs is either an interpolation of a copyist, as Feurlin and Rossi conjecture, or else it is a misstatement by Diogenes. There is not a single iambic verse of his remaining. But in his hexameters he opposes Homer and Hesiod, as we have seen. sixth book, when describing Elea, speaks of Parmenides and Zeno as having lived there, but is silent respecting Xenophanes, which Hegel holds to be suspicious. Indeed the words of Diogenes Laertius are vague. He says, "Xenophanes wrote two thousand verses on the foundation of Colophon, and on a colony sent to Elea." This by no means implies that he lived there. Nevertheless we concur with the modern writers who, from the various connections with the Eleatics observable in his fragments, maintain that he must actually have resided there. The reader is again referred to M. Cousin on this point. Be that as it may, Xenophanes terminated a long and active life without having solved the great problem. The indecision of his acute mind sowed the seeds of that skepticism which was hereafter to play so large a part in philosophy. All his knowledge enabled him only to know how little he knew. His state of mind is finely described by Timon the sillograph, who puts into the mouth of Xenophanes these words: "Oh that mine were the deep mind, prudent and looking to both sides! Long, alas! have I strayed on the road of error, beguiled, And am, now, hoary of years, yet exposed to doubt and distraction I am lost in the One and All.”—(εἰς ἓν ταὐτό τε πᾶν ἀνελύετο.)* It now remains for us to state some of the conclusions at which this great man arrived. They will not, perhaps, answer to the reader's expectation; as with Pythagoras, the reputation for extraordinary wisdom seems ill justified by the fragments of that wisdom which have descended to us. But although to modern philosophy the conclusions of these early thinkers may appear trivial, let us never forget that it is to these early thinkers that we owe our modern philosophy. Had there not been many a "Gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought," * Preserved by Sextus Empiricus, Hypot. Pyrrhon. i. 224; and quoted also by Ritter, i. 443. + Tennyson. we should not have been able to travel on the secure terrestrial path of slow inductive science. The impossible has to be proved impossible, before men will consent to limit their endeavors to the compassing of the possible. And it was the cry of despair which escaped from Xenophanes, the cry that nothing can be certainly known, which first called men's attention to the nothingness of knowledge, as knowledge was then conceived. Xenophanes opens a series of thinkers, which attained its climax in Pyrrho. That he should thus have been at the head of the monotheists, and at the head of the skeptics, is sufficient to entitle his speculations to an extended consideration here. § II. THE PHILOSOPHY OF XENOPHANES. The great problem of existence had early presented itself to his mind; and the resolution of that problem by Thales and Pythagoras had left him unsatisfied. Neither the physical nor the mathematical explanation could still the doubts which rose within him. On all sides he was oppressed with mysteries, which these doctrines could not penetrate. The state of his mind is graphically painted in that one phrase of Aristotle's: "Casting his eyes upwards at the immensity of heaven, he declared that The One is God." Overarching him was the deep blue, infinite vault, immovable, unchangeable, embracing him and all things; that he proclaimed to be God. As Thales had gazed abroad upon the sea, and felt that he was resting on its infinite bosom, so Xenophanes gazed above him at the sky, and felt that he was encompassed by it. Moreover it was a great mystery, inviting yet defying scrutiny. The sun and moon whirled to and fro through it; the stars were "Pinnacled dim in its intense inane." The earth was constantly aspiring to it in the shape of vapor, the souls of men were perpetually aspiring to it with vague yearnings. It was the centre of all existence; it was Existence itself. It was The One,-the Immovable, on whose bosom the Many were moved. Is not this the explanation of that opinion universally attributed to him, but always variously interpreted, "God is a sphere?" The Heaven encompassing him and all things, was it not The One Sphere which he proclaimed to be God? It is very true that this explanation does not exactly accord with his physics, especially with that part which relates to the earth being a flat surface, whose inferior regions are infinite, by which he explained the fixity of the earth. M. Cousin, in consequence of this discrepancy, would interpret the phrase as metaphorical, "The epithet spherical is simply a Greek locution, to indicate the perfect equality and absolute unity of God, and of which a sphere may be an image. The paipixós of the Greeks is the rotundus of the Latins. It is a metaphorical expression, such as that of square, meaning perfect; an expression which, though now become trivial, had at the birth of mathematical science something noble and elevated in it, and is found in most elevated compositions of poetry. Simonides speaks of a 'man square as to his feet, his hands, and his mind,' meaning an accomplished man; and the metaphor is also used by Aristotle. It is not, therefore, surprising that Xenophanes, a poet as well as a philosopher, writing in verse, and incapable of finding the metaphysical expression which answered to his ideas, should have borrowed from the language of imagination the expression which would best render his idea." We should be tempted to adopt this explanation, could we be satisfied that the Physics of Xenophanes were precisely what it is said they were, or that they were such at the epoch in which he maintained the sphericity of God. This latter difficulty is insuperable, but has been unobserved by all critics. A man who lives a hundred years, necessarily changes his opinions on such subjects; and when opinions are so lightly grounded, as were those of philosophers at that epoch, it is but natural to admit that the changes may have been frequent and abrupt. In this special instance, scholars have been aware of the very great and irreconcilable contradictions existing between certain opinions equally authentic; showing him to have been decidedly Physical (Ionian) in one department, and as decidedly Mathematical (Pythagorean) in another. As to the case in point, Aristotle's express statement of Xenophanes having "looked up at heaven, and pronounced The One to be God," is manifestly at variance with any belief in the infinity of the lower regions of the earth. The One must be the Infinite. To return, however, to his Monotheism, or more properly Pantheism, which is the greatest peculiarity of his doctrine: he not only destroyed the notion of a multiplicity of Gods, but he proclaimed the Self-existence and Intelligence of The One. God must be Self-existent; for to conceive Being as incipient is impossible. Nothing can be produced from Nothing. Whence, therefore, was Being produced? From itself? No; for then it must have been already in existence to produce itself, otherwise it would have been produced from nothing. Hence the primary law: Being is self-existent. If self-existent, consequently eternal. As in this it is implied that God is all-powerful and all-wise and all-existent, a multiplicity of Gods is inconceivable. It also follows that God is immovable, when considered as The All: "Wholly unmoved and unmoving it ever remains in the same place, Without change in its place when at times it changes appearance." The All must be unmoved; there is nothing to move it. It cannot move itself; for to do so it must be external to itself. We must not suppose that he denied motion to finite things because he denied it to the Infinite. He only maintained that The All was unmoved. Finite things were moved by God: "without labor, he ruleth all things by reason and insight." His monotheism was carefully distinguished from anthropomorphism, as the verses previously quoted have already exemplified. Let us only further remark on the passage in Diogenes Laertius, wherein he is said to have maintained that "God did not resemble man, for he heard and saw all things without respira |