It will perhaps interest readers of The Monist to have before them the following attempt at an English version of the poem (or rather of the principal fragments of it that survive) in which the father of monism embodied the passion, one might almost say the fury, of his conviction that What Is is One.
The verses of Parmenides “On the Nature of Things” are remarkable for two reasons: they are the first thorough-going attempt to prove that reality is a unity, and they are the earliest expression of an idea which was to dominate philosophy with tremendous consequences for nearly two thousand years afterward.
The conclusions of the Eleatic school as to the nature of reality were too fantastic to be widely accepted; but the theory stated by Parmenides, the first