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XENOPHANES was a contamporary of Pythagoras; and, like him, an emigrant from Ionia to Italy. He was born at Colophon, near Ephesus, and ultimately settled at the Phocæan colony of Elea, on the gulf of Poseidonia, near Pæstum. His thoughts were uttered in poetry, of which only a few fragments have come down to us. So far as we can judge, they are an indignant protest against the polytheistic principle of fashioning gods in the likeness of men, and an attempt to lead men to a purer form of worship. Men, he said,
- "foolishly think that Gods are born like as men are,
- And have to dress like their own, and their voice, and their figure;
- But if oxen and lions had hands like ours, and fingers,
- Then would horses like unto horses, and oxen to oxen,
- Paint and fashion their own god-forms, and give to them bodies
- Of like shape to their own, as they themselves too are fashioned."
"There is but one God," he said,
- "the greatest of gods and of mortals:
- Neither in body, nor yet in thought, is he like unto mankind."
Aristotle says of him that he was the first who regarded the universe as one great whole; "looking up into the vault of heaven, he declared that the One was God," He was profoundly convinced of man's incapacity for absolute knowledge. "No man," he said, "knows clearly about the gods or the universe: even if he speak what is true, he himself does not know it to be true: all is matter of opinion." The varied views of man as to the facts of the world round him were relative to his own faculties, not an expression of absolute knowledge. The principle disciple of Xenophanes was Parmenides, who expressed the contrast between absolute unknowable existence and the study of shifting multiform phenomena with even stronger emphasis and fuller detail.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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