424 Colonel Kennepy on the Védanta System. 
criticism assertions founded on texts undeserving of credit, of bad writers 
of the Greek empire, have charged Xenoruanes, and also his school, with 
the imputation of pantheism, at present so thoroughly established and 
accredited in respect to the philosophic crowd, that in attacking such 
a ridiculous prejudice, and in here substituting the authority of ArisrorLe 
for that of Turoporet, the pseudo PLurarcu and the pseudo OricEn, it is 
we who will be considered as rash, and the mere advancers of a paradox.”* 
This will no doubt appear a strange manner of treating the inestimable 
works of a Brucker, a TrepMann, and a TENNEMANN ; but as so arrogant 
a mode of contemning the labours of preceding authors is not likely to 
detract from their authority, I shall transcribe the following remarks of 
TiepMANN : 
«« However firmly the Eleatic philosopher may have hitherto sustained his 
flight into the intellectual regions, and however well he may have main- 
tained himself there, still he could neither separate himself sufficiently from 
sensible objects nor abstract extension from substance. In consequence, 
he suddenly falls into absurdities, which greater metaphysicians, who lived 
after him, have not failed to mention. Pxrato, from the same passages (as 
those before quoted), draws the conclusion, that the one has also extension, 
has parts, and consequently that it is not in the strictest sense one, and 
therefore that Parmentipes is not free from self-contradiction. ArisToTLE 
makes the same objection with perfect justice.” 
“The one or all, equally thinking and extended, is God; for the same 
verses of ParmenipEs, which Pxaro refers to the all, are explained by 
AniIsToTLE as applicable to God; and amongst all the ancients, without 
exception, it was assumed as fully admitted, that the terms God, the one, and 
the ai/, bore one and the same signification.” 
“So, consequently, Parmenrprs is, like his teacher XENOPHANES, a pantheist, 
but a better pantheist, in so far that he elevated the gross materialism of all 
his predecessors, by denying that separate and separable parts and mutability 
were ascribable to the ai/ and to the divine nature, and thus he drew nearer 
to the simple and spiritual: in so far, also, that, in respect to immutability, 
he thought more sublimely of the divine nature, and that he was the first 
amongst philosophers who ascribed that attribute to the deity, without which 
he cannot be considered as God, nor duly distinguished from all other things. 
* Nouveaux Fragmens Philosophiques, p. 87. 
