106. Empedokles and Parmenides.At the very outset of his poem, Empedocles speaks angrily of those who professed to have found the whole (fr. 2); he even calls this "madness" (fr. 4). No doubt he is thinking of Parmenides. His own position is not, however, sceptical. He only deprecates the attempt to construct a theory of the universe off-hand instead of trying to understand each thing we come across "in the way in which it is clear" (fr. 4). And this means that we must not, like Parmenides, reject the assistance of the senses. We soon discover, however, that Empedokles too sets up a system which is to explain everything, though that system is no longer a monistic one.
It is often said that this system was an attempt to mediate between Parmenides and Herakleitos. It is not easy, however, to find any trace of Herakleitean doctrine in it, and it would be truer to say that it aimed at mediating between Eleaticism and the senses. Empedokles repeats, almost in the same words, the Eleatic argument for the sole reality and indestructibility of "what is" (frs. 11–15); and his idea of the "Sphere" seems to be derived from the Parmenidean description of reality.[1] Parmenides had held that what underlies the illusory world of the senses was a corporeal, spherical, continuous, eternal, and immovable plenum, and it is from this Empedokles starts. Given the sphere of Parmenides, he seems to have said, how are we to get from it to the world we know? How are we to introduce motion into the immovable plenum? Now Parmenides need not have denied the possibility of motion within the Sphere, though he was bound to deny all motion of the Sphere itself; but such an admission would not have served to explain anything. If any part of the Sphere were to move, the room of the displaced body must at once be taken by other body, for there is no empty space. This, however, would be of precisely the same kind as the body it had displaced; for all "that is" is one. The result of
- ↑ Cf. Emp. frs. 27, 28, with Parm. fr. 8.
