COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



Matter as well as of Mind constitutes a legiti- 

 mate subject of investigation ; and that from 

 the knowledge formed by the organized expe- 

 rience of recurring states of consciousness, we 

 can in some mysterious way rise to a so-called 

 higher grade of knowledge, in which realities 

 no less than phenomena may become the object 

 of thought. The earliest philosophic specula- 

 tions of the Greeks dealt almost exclusively 

 with the origin of the Universe, and the nature 

 of its Trpayrr) dpxv or First Cause, or with just 

 such theories of the ultirriate constitution of 

 matter as we saw in the previous chapter leading 

 us to alternative impossibilities of thought. In 

 the " Parmenides " and " Sophistes " of Plato we 

 may find, presented with unrivalled acuteness, 

 though rendered dreary by endless verbal quib- 

 bling, many of the same inquiries concerning 

 the nature of the Absolute which we have been 

 led to condemn as impracticable. Is the Abso- 

 lute One or Many? Is the One Finite or is it 

 Infinite ? And these inquiries, in the first-named 

 dialogue, lead up to the same sort of startling 

 paradoxes which we have already signalized as 

 the inevitable outcome of speculation upon such 

 subjects. In his first argument, Parmenides de- 

 monstrates that the One is neither in itself nor 

 in anything else, neither at rest nor in motion, 

 neither the same with itself nor different from 

 itself. In his second argument, he demonstrates 

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