PROP. VI.————
Was made a question of being by the early philosophers. Thales.5. This mistaken direction showed itself most in the earliest period of speculation. Thus, when Thales maintained that moisture, or when Anaximenes proclaimed that air, was the one in the many—the principle common to all existence—the research was evidently an inquiry into being, and moreover into mere material being. Such crude essays are memorable only as early indications of a right tendency wrongly directed; the right tendency being the inclination to detect some one circumstance common to a multitude of diversified phenomena—its wrong direction being the application of this inclination to the phenomena of existence, and not, in the first instance, to the phenomena of cognition.
Parmenides. What change he effected on the question.6. Parmenides extended the inquiry beyond mere sensible or material existence; but he effected no revolution in the character of the problem. Conceiving that the only truth worthy of a philosopher's consideration was such as could not possibly be other than it is; and aware, moreover, that truth characterised by this strict necessity was not to be found amid the phenomena of sense, he rejected, as of no value in philosophy, the meagre results of the physical inquirers who had preceded him. The central and abiding principle of the universe, the common quality, the binding unity in all things, must present itself, not only as an actual