14 The Concept of Method 



of the individual. They thus prepared the way for a later meta- 

 physical inquiry and for the ethical emphasis of later Greek 

 philosophy. They were followed by the Eleatics, who gave a 

 metaphysical interpretation to the phenomena of the world. 

 While recognising the problem of change and realising the re- 

 lation of being and becoming, they attempted to formulate a 

 synthesis of these two aspects in the conception of the ultimate 

 unity and unchangeableness of reality, so that they, either ex- 

 plicitly or implicitly, identify the natural and the divine. Xeno- 

 phanes (b. 570 B.C.), whose interests were chiefly theological, 

 criticised the Greek anthropomorphic conceptions of what is 

 divine, and emphasised the unity of all things. Parmenides 

 {circ. 490 B. C.), more metaphysical in the trend of his thought, 

 chiefly concerned himself w^ith the distinction between not-being 

 and being, the knowledge of which is truth. The senses lead 

 men into error and give rise to common opinion ( So'^a) which 

 is to be distinguished from right reason (Ao'yos ). We have here, 

 then, the clear suggestion of the problem which the Sophists 

 were to give up as hopeless and which Socrates was to solve. 



So far the trend of Greek thought has been to attempt to 

 reduce the multiplicity of the phenomena of experience to some 

 fundamental unity which is ultimately true and real, and the 

 knowledge of which should constitute the aim of human thought. 

 With the Later Ionian philosophers, however, experience seems 

 to involve two elements that cannot be reconciled, and w^e have 

 the formulation of a dualistic and mechanical conception of the 

 nature of reality. In opposition to the immutability which the 

 Eleatics conceived to be the true reality, Heraclitus (b. circ. 

 530 B. C.) found universal change to be characteristic of ex- 

 perience. Nothing actually is, but all things are in a process 

 of becoming. Hence, the evidence of the senses cannot be con- 

 sidered as true; only rational knowledge is valuable, and this 

 rational knowledge ( Wyos ) is the power that governs the world. 

 Anaxagoras (b. circ. 500 B. C.) emphasises his belief that the 

 world was developed by Nors out of an original mixture of the 

 particles of all kinds of matter. Mind, itself, is above this mate- 

 rial, from which it is distinguished by being simple and unmixed, 

 by being self-governed, and by having power over all the other 

 things. 



