Читать книгу A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy онлайн

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Xenophanes, who was more of a religious reformer than a philosopher, was so absorbed in the first of these assumptions that he developed it for his purpose in his practical social reformation to the entire neglect of the second assumption. The Eleatics, however, to whose city Xenophanes had come, could not leave his doctrine in its one-sided and undeveloped form. They accepted his teaching of the divine Unchangingness of the universe, but this compelled these profounder thinkers to offer some explanation of the natural processes of change. Change to them cannot really exist. Heracleitus, on the other hand, was impressed with the aspect of life that is expressed in the second assumption of the Milesians—living matter is moving matter. He therefore maintained in direct opposition to the Eleatics, that the changing, living processes of nature alone are real. The two contradictory assumptions that lay so mutually indifferent in the Milesian doctrine thus became the basis of a sharp metaphysical controversy between Heracleitus and the Eleatics. The substance of the world is permanent, change is an illusion, said the Eleatics. The substance of the world changes, permanence is an illusion, said Heracleitus. Either all things are permanent or all things change. These early philosophers had no wealth of empirical knowledge nor of psychological reflection upon which to draw, and it is not strange that they should take extreme positions and be blind to their practical consequences.