Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/141

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86
GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

data of sense, the universe as apprehended by the sense, it was this which constituted the changeable element in the fundamental antithesis with which they had to deal.

11. This dialectical movement—a movement not urged against them by their adversaries, but one forced upon them by the logical necessities of their position, and one to which they readily yielded—this movement comes more to the surface in Parmenides and Zeno than it does in Xenophanes. But it showed itself to some extent in Xenophanes, and in him we first find an implied though not explicit severance made between the intelligible world and the sensible world, between the world of reason and the world of sense, and the former represented as the sphere of reality, the latter as that of unreality.

12. Xenophanes did not hold that there was no sensible world; no idealist ever maintained that, although we shall see by-and-by that under the stricter interpretation of his system Parmenides is forced to such a conclusion. But I say Xenophanes did not hold that there was no sensible world. He held, however, that it had no reality, no reality in itself, but only a reality in and for the mind of man, which reality was, in fact, no reality at all. It was a mere subjective phenomenon, and possessed no such truth as that which reason compelled us to attribute to the permanent one, which, according to