508 A. E. TAYLOE: J(De Sensibus, 4, Diels, Doxographi, p. 499). 1 That Parmenides notoriously held that our own senses deceive us in the picture of existence they present to us is no justification for attributing to him the much more developed doctrine of a source of knowledge radically different in kind from sensation. At best his poem con- tains the merest germ of epistemological dualism (see Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 189 ff.). (b) Next I object to "space" as an equivalent for the Parmenidean ' Being '. With Burnet and Baumker, to mention no other names, I hold that Parmenides is perfectly serious when he speaks of his "Being" as a plenum (Fr. 80) and as in stable equilibrium (Fr. 106), and I maintain therefore that the true name for it in English is not " space," but "body". If Mr. Benn really disputes this I should like to ask him, first, how he translates the expressions irav S' 2/xTrA.eov eo-riv tovros, and fvKVKov (r<f>aip7)<i tvaXiyKLOv oy/co), jU.(rcro0V to"O7rae? iravrrj, and next what the "not-Being" of which Parmenides will not allow us to speak or think can be, if it is not precisely exten- sion as distinguished from the body that is extended? The pas- sage from Gomperz to which Mr. Benn refers appears to me for one thing to have no bearing at all on the question whether the Parmenidean ' Being ' is or is not space, as distinguished from body, and, for another, to involve in virtue of its allusions to Spinoza one of those brilliant but misleading analogies to which, if I may say so, Gomperz is even more addicted than Mr. Benn himself, (c) Finally, I object to the statement that Parmenides " identified " space and reason as implying a false and impossible piece of translation. An " identity philosophy " in the days before the recognition of mind and body as two superficially distinct realities would have been an unthinkable anachronism. So long as body was the only reality of which philosophy knew, there was as yet nothing for the ' identity philosophy ' to identify. My view in short is that Parmenides could not have held that " conscious- ness" and physical processes were aspects of an identical substance, just because he held, as Theophrastus carefully explains, that the processes of consciousness are themselves physical. And as for the Greek, I submit that Zeller and Burnet's translation of the famous TO yap avro voetv ecrrtv re /ecu etvcu, "it is the same thing that can be thought and can be," is the only version that is even possible, if we pay proper regard to the idioms of the philosophic Greek of the fifth century. (2) My next point was that Mr. Benn's language about the 1 Mr. Benn refers to the Theophrastus passage in connexion with the second of my alleged instances of oversight, but dismisses it as ' relating not to knowledge but to sensation ' (MiND, N.S., 46, p. 236). The dis- tinction in any case would be of doubtful value in dealing with philoso- phers who, as Aristotle tells US, ra oi/ra vneXafiov tlvai TO. atVtfijra p.6vov, and its relevancy in the special case of Parmenides is excluded by the express words of Theophrastus himself, supported as they are by direct citation from Parmenides' poem.
