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 Eleatic, and never since more vigorously stated, that there is only one way of obtaining scientific knowledge about the world, established itself almost without question. That truths having the certainty of demonstration can only be reached by a priori reasoning and never by observation of phenomena, which therefore cannot be the objects of science, -this theory, once promulgated by Parmenides, was taken up into the main stream of Greek thought as a fundamental assumption. Plato and Aristotle shared it, and its validity, supported by the great fabric of the Aristotelian logic, was never seriously attacked until Galileo looked through his “optick glass.” Even then it survived in part; for it is still true that we have no absolutely certain knowledge except such as can be deduced from general principles. But when science began to advance independently of Aristotle, the domain of the a priori was curtailed. We no longer think that no knowledge except the absolutely certain deserves to be called scientific; in investigating the laws of nature we are content with a high and ever increasing degree of probability. The main interest of Parmenides’s poem is that in it a tendency which was to defer that consummation for many centuries first becomes articulate.

It has the strangeness of all origins. No literary document of equal importance bristles with problems apparently so hopeless of solution. There are, to begin with, several difficulties connected with its structure. It has two parts: an exposition (with a proem) of the Way of Truth, and an exposition of the Way of Opinion, of which the first is preserved almost in its entirety, while perhaps one-tenth of the second survives. In the opening lines the philosopher is whirled away in the chariot of the Sun to the abode of a Goddess, who expounds to him two doctrines, a true and a false, “the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth” and “the opinions of mortals.” What is the nature of the journey, and who is the Goddess? Why, after she has declared the truth about the universe, should an account which is emphatically stated to be false then be put into her mouth? No certain answer seems possible to these questions. As to the journey, it looks at first sight as if Parmenides were conveyed in the chariot upwards from darkness to the “Gateway of the Paths of Night and Day,” and that then he passes through the gateway into a realm of light where the Goddess makes her revelations. But it is just possible to interpret the text as a descent to the nether world. On this view, which is that of Otto Gilbert, the gate described so minutely in the proem (13-24) is the door of Hades. We must conceive the philosopher as accompanying the Sun on its nightly journey to the under-world, and the Maidens who guide the car as persuading the Goddess to open the gate of Night and Day, which she guards, that they may pass through and the Sun resume his daily course. They then drive on and upwards, leaving Parmenides alone with the Goddess, who is no other than that “Justice” or “Necessity” mentioned in other parts of the poem. There is much to recommend this view, which is interesting as making Parmenides one of the illustrious company of poets, headed by Homer, Virgil and Dante, who have descended to the under-world; but the arguments for and against it cannot be discussed here. Whether the journey be heavenward or hellward, the identification of the Goddess with Justice and Necessity, and again with her who, in the cosmological part of the poem, is in the center of the “rings,” “steers all things,” and is the creator of the gods (187-192), has great plausibility. Mr. Cornford has ingeniously connected her with the principle on which, in primitive religious systems, the universe is marked out by tabus. But on these points there is likely for some time to come to be more speculation than agreement among scholars.

As to the Way of Opinion, which forms the last part of the poem, and which seems to have contained a system of the world in which concentric spheres or rings of light and darkness played a part, and an account of the birth and decay of gods, of material objects, of animals and of the bodies and souls of men, the difficulty is to explain why Parmenides stated it in such detail. The few fragments of it that we possess are not continuous, and I have therefore not translated them all. It appears from them that the cosmology of the Way of Opinion had an affinity to that of the Pythagoreans, and Professor Burnet has sought in this fact an explanation of our difficulty. Parmenides had been a Pythagorean, and was now, he suggests, founding a dissident school. It was therefore “necessary for him to instruct his disciples in the system they might be called on to oppose.” If we adopt this view, we may outline the trend of the argument as follows, disengaging it from the archaic language in which it is expressed.

Nothing can have any reality except What Is: for every thought must have an object – thought and its object in fact form an indivisible unity – and the object of a thought cannot be nothing (49, 61-64, 29- 31). Further, reality must be eternal, i.e., without beginning and without end. It cannot come into being, because it cannot be produced by nothing, and nothing existed before the existence of that which is real (86-98). Again, no reason can be given why, if it began to be, it should begin at one time rather than another (92-94). And similarly it cannot come to an end (106-108). Thus it is a mistake to attribute any reality at all to the processes of change, growth and decay that we see going on round us (109-112, 135-140). And reality is absolutely single, simple and continuous. It cannot have parts, because, if there were parts, there would be empty gaps between them and thus more reality in some places than in others, which is absurd (113-117, 145-150). We must therefore conceive the substance of the universe as shaped like a sphere (since the spherical is the most unbroken and perfect of forms) with no vacuum anywhere, perfectly stable, with no differences, changes or motions (141-144). This sphere, though its existence is temporally endless, is limited in space; for if it were infinite there would always be “something lacking” to complete the sum-total of reality; but this is impossible (125-128). Thus the prejudices of common sense, which sees differences everywhere – differences of distance, for instance (49) – and thinks that things become and perish and that there is such a thing as change of sensible qualities (135-140), are all false, in spite of the difficulty we have in shaking them off, confirmed as they seem to be by constant experience (42). And not only so, the more refined views of philosophers are false too, particularly the views of Heraclitus of Ephesus, who holds that the only scientific truth attainable is that based on the endless flow of shifting sense-experience (69-76). There is only one way of attaining truth, namely by following reason (45-48). There is, however, one account of the universe, that given by the Pythagoreans, which is so inherently plausible that it must be expounded at length; you must be versed in its details to be able to refute them (167, 168). It is based on a dualism – that of the “light” or “fiery” and “dark” or “heavy” elements – which of course cannot for a moment be accepted, as our argument proves conclusively that all things are One.

But when we have done the best we can with the journey and the Goddess and the Way of Opinion a stumbling-block still remains. It is not only modern readers to whom it seems strange that Parmenides wrote in verse; the fact disconcerted antiquity as well. It was felt that he was essentially prosaic. Why then did he drape his theory in the rich, stiff, hieratic dress of the hexameter, as the old sculptors clothed their idea of deity in stiffly falling lines of stone and bronze and wood? Why did this first founder of rationalism begin the custom, which has since had so long and so curious a history, of mixing argument with poetry? The essence of his gospel is “Cleave to the dry light of the intellect, whatever the richness of the facts that strike the senses,” and one would think that, than such a gospel, nothing was less suitable to poetry, for which, besides, he evidently had but a meagre gift. His technique is clumsy, his images artificial and insipid; his lines jolt and hobble, and he has no warmth of imagination, no glowing colors with which to enrich and soften the bald severity of his subject.

Perhaps it was partly out of opposition to Heraclitus, with his talent for hitting out a striking phrase in prose, that Parmenides chose verse. “Let this gross believer in the trustworthiness of sense-perception string his pedestrian sentences together; my doctrine of the perfect stability, the unbroken unity, of the real demands a form as stable and rounded as itself.” Such may have been his feeling. And perhaps the influence of Hesiod went for something. Hesiod had written his account of “Works and Days,” of the birth of gods and the ordering of the world, in hexameters, and there is more than one Hesiodic trait in Parmenides. Another influence may have been the Orphic poems current in the Pythagorean school from which Parmenides sprang. But whatever his motives, and whatever his defects as a poet (they have been exaggerated by some critics, minimized by others), our verdict must on the whole be that he was justified. It is not so much that the introduction contains what Diels calls “a powerful conception.” That is a matter of opinion; many readers will find it unimpressive where it is vague (and it is nearly all vague), and pointless where it is precise, as in the description of the gate. Parmenides’s real justification is the intensity of his passion for the truth.

All philosophers, no doubt, are impassioned for the truth, but not all philosophers are possessed of a passion for the compulsive force of argument. When a man has hit upon an abstract argument in which he can see no flaw and which leads to conclusions violently opposed both to common sense and to the views of other philosophers, his zeal is apt to take an almost religious tinge. Up to a point the love of reason seems, indeed, to be implanted in the human breast. The most irrational of men, those most impatient of logic, take an unconscious pleasure in the struggle to elicit conclusions from premises; the motions of their minds, sluggish though they may be, are always fumbling after some rudiments of a chain of inference. But let the beauties of logical connection once become the object of conscious admiration and be deliberately pursued for their own sake, and there are men who, having tasted blood, will stop nowhere. In them our natural, unconscious pleasure in ratiocination is heightened to the nth power; they exalt the value of consistency above everything in the world. It becomes a fixed idea; they give up everything for it; they embrace an abstraction with the abandonment with which the lover embraces his mistress, the devotee his god. The world, to them, is well lost for logic. Are the facts against them? So much the worse for the facts, they cry. They are the martyrs of reason; they are sublime. And they are more than sublime, they are right; for the progress of humanity depends in the long run on the love of reason.

Parmenides was such a man, and his verses are poetry because they are moulded by this passion. That is why they are least good in the half-mythological, half-allegorical preface with which, for reasons at which we can but dimly guess, he leads up to his belief that nothing Is except What Is, and best when he is in the thick of his argument, stumbling, stammering, repeating himself, and wrestling with the reluctance of the language of his day to express his ideas. In his desperate anxiety to make his point clear his verses become rough and harsh, and it is then that they take on a certain sublimity, as of igneous rocks compressed and thrown up by tremendous subterranean forces.

It will perhaps be objected that he could have made his point clear more easily in prose. To this an answer has been provided by a very different poet, Alexander Pope, who explains, in the introduction to the “Essay on Man,” that he found he could actually express his philosophical ideas more concisely in verse than in prose. For the labor of throwing a theory into verse has at any rate this merit, that the philosopher who is diffuse is lost. The nature of the medium compels him to grind and sharpen his thoughts until, purged of all superfluities, they attain the utmost sparenesss and compactness of which they are capable. So true is this that far from blaming Parmenides we should wish that modern philosophers would imitate him and Lucretius and compose in verse; their arguments, if like Lucretius and Parmenides it is their arguments they are in earnest about, might be improved by the discipline. On the other hand if like Pope they care not a pin for the argument but greatly for the opportunities of verbal decoration, conceivably some entertaining poetry might be produced.

Passion, then, and conciseness – passion in spite of the lack of imaginative heat, conciseness in spite of clumsiness and repetition – are Parmenides’s most striking qualities. That the quatrains into which I have transposed him preserve more than the dimmest reflection of these qualities it would be too much to hope. Hardly can the color and life of a phrase be conveyed from one living language to another, much less from an ancient to a living language. The only respect in which the translator can hope to be a faithful mirror is in giving, feature by feature, the connections of his author’s thought; and, since in doing this he may be allowed to take the necessary liberties with his text, I have had no compunction in condensing here, amplifying there, and occasionally omitting a line or two altogether. Without trying to be always literal I have aimed at omitting no point of importance. The real difficulty was to find a vocabulary not too remote in spirit from the original. In the case of an early philosopher this difficulty is especially acute.

Parmenides was 65 years old when he came to Athens and talked with Socrates who was then a youth of 18 to 20 – a fact which gives us 516-514, B. C, as the date of his birth – and at the time he taught the process of stretching the words and phrases of ordinary speech to fit philosophical ideas had scarcely begun. In the absence of a technical vocabulary thought both outruns language and is crippled by it, so that our more abstract colorless words which have a long philosophical evolution behind them seldom quite fit the early thinker’s meaning. It is not that his ideas are vaguer than ours, but their vagueness is of a different kind. Ours is a washed-out vagueness, theirs a dense, packed vagueness, pregnant with the germs of future growth. Thus the translator is in a dilemma. He cannot, since the thoughts he is to render are philosophical, altogether avoid words which, like “reason” or “infinite,” have done philosophical duty for centuries; yet he knows that such words distort the spirit of the original, because their fifth-century Greek equivalents are only just beginning to have a specialized philosophical color. For this reason I have employed such words as sparingly as possible. But then another danger arises. Modern technical phrases may strike a false note, but if we do not use them we risk blurring the outlines of the technical questions the author is struggling to state. Above all in Parmenides’s poem the student is fascinated by the spectacle of later ideas stirring in embryo, – as where he announces in one place (62) : “It must needs be that what can be thought and spoken of is,” in another (129) that thought and “the goal of thought” (i.e., that for the sake of which the thought is, that to which it is directed, its object, as we say) are one and the same, and again (135, 158) that certain things, e. g., becoming and perishing, are mere names. Here we seem to catch logic and epistemology almost in the act of being born. What is meaning? What are propositions? Must not the object of every judgment be something real? Can an object of consciousness be conceived apart from a conscious subject? These vast questions are enfolded in the verses of Parmenides as the oak in the acorn. Another instance is the argument, on which he bases the oneness of What Is, that there cannot be more reality in one place than in another (51, 52, 113-116, 145-152). We may trace here the germ of Zeno’s antinomy of the great and little, which in its turn is the germ of that supposed self contradictoriness of the infinite divisibility of space which has played so important a part in modern philosophy. Such problems hovered before the mind of Parmenides as in a glass darkly, and I shall be content if in my translation some faint image of them can still be discerned.

Sydney Waterlow