ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
ELE—ELE
ELEANOR, of Aquitaine (1122–1204), queen of France and afterwards of England, was the daughter of William IX., the last duke of Guienne, and was born in 1122. She succeeded her father in 1138, and was married the same year to Louis VII. of France. Her lively and somewhat frivolous manners, and her love of pleasure, did not fit her for the society of a husband who was naturally austere, and who from religious conviction had adopted many ascetic habits. They became gradually estranged, and in the Holy Land, whither she had accompanied Louis in 1147, their quarrels became so frequent and so bitter that at last a divorce was agreed upon, which on their return from France was completed under the pretext of kinship, 18th March 1152. Six months afterwards she gave her hand and her possessions to Henry of Navarre, who in 1135 mounted the throne of England as Henry II. That the duchy of Guienne should thus become permanently annexed to the English crown was naturally displeasing to Louis, and the indirect consequence of his displeasure was protracted wars between France and England. In other respects also the marriage had unhappy consequences. The infidelities of Henry, and the special favours he showed to one of his mistresses, so greatly roused Eleanor’s jealousy, that she incited her son Richard to rebellion, and also in- trigued with her former husband to get him to lend his influence to the great league formed against Henry in 1173. Her son had fled to Louis, and she was preparing to follow him when she was arrested and placed in confinement, where she remained till the death of her husband in 1189. As soon as he died she regained her liberty. and reigned as regent until Richards arrival from France. She also held this position during Richard’s absence in the Holy Land, for which he left in 1190. After his escape in 1194 from the captivity which befell him as he was returning home, she retired to the abbey of Foiitevrault, where she died April 1, 1204.
ELEATIC SCHOOL, a Greek school of philosophy, so called because Elea was the birth-place or residence of its chief representatives. Parmenides, who was born at Elea probably about the year 515, was the first completely to develop the Eleatic doctrines; but his philosophy has a very close connection with that of Xenophanes, who was born more than a century earlier. Xenophanes, indeed, has been described as the founder of the school, and though that title is with more strictness to be given to Parmenides, it may not incorrectly be applied to him. The philosophy of Xenophanes took its rise in a strong antagonism to the popular anthropomorphic mythology ; and, though it con- tains part, it is far from containing the whole, of the Eleatic doctrine as maintained by Parmenides and his followers. Its chief doctrines were that “ the One is God,” and that God is self-existent, eternal, unchangeable, immovable, of the same substance throughout, and in every respect incomparable to man.
a complete severance and opposition of thought and sense. Truth is in no degree attainable by sense; sense gives only false appearances, non-being: it is by thought alone that we arrive at the knowledge of being, at the great truth that “ the All is One,” eternal, unchangeable, or rather, as Hegel rightly interprets the Eleatics, thought is being. No distinction is drawn by Parmenides between thought and material being; the “ One and All,” indeed, is described materially as a perfect and immovable sphere. The notions of creation, change and destruction, diversity and multipli- city, time and space, and the various sensations, are all mere false appearances of sense, which thought shows to be contradictory and false. Upon a very common con- fusion of the word exist with the verb to be, which does not necessarily imply existence, he founded his argument against the possibility of creation : creation cannot be, .for being cannot arise out of non-being; nor can non-being be. Again, there can be no difference or change except in appearance, for a thing cannot arise from what is different from it. But this side of the Eleatic argument was more completely developed by Zeno. In the second part of his poem, Parmenides, notwithstanding his assertion of their falseness, does offer an explanation of the facts of consc10us- ness. Of this part of his theory, however, we have only very incomplete knowledge. It stands altogether distinct from his main doctrine. It is materialistic, like nearly all the other early Greek explanations of the universe. The universe (that is, the apparent universe) is, he says, made up of two elements, one of which he describes as heat and light, the other as cold and darkness. Of these elements all men are composed, and their thinking varies as the proportions
