“No man at any time knew clearly and truly; nor will he ever know What of the gods I say, as also of the universe. For what he thinks to speak most perfectly He knows that not at all; his own opinions cleave to all.” Sextus, generalizing, explains this in the first passage thus: “Let us imagine that in a house in which are many valuables, there were those who sought for gold by night; in such a case everyone would think that he had found the gold, but would not know certainly whether he actually had found it. Thus philosophers come into this world as into a great house to seek the truth, but were they to reach it, they could not tell whether they really had attained to it.” The indefinite expressions of Xenophanes might also merely mean that none knows that which he (Xenophanes) here makes known. In the second passage Sextus puts it thus: “Xenophanes does not make all knowledge void, but only the scientific and infallible; opinionative knowledge is, however, left. He expresses this in saying that opinion cleaves to all. So that with him the criterion is made to be opinion, i.e. the apparent, and not that which is firm and sure; Parmenides, on the contrary, condemns opinion.” But from his doctrine of the One, there follows the annihilation of ordinary ideas, which is what he did in the foregoing dialectic; it is evident, however, that nobody could know the truth which he hereby utters. If a thought such as this passed through one’s head, one could not tell that it was true, and in such a case it would only be an opinion. We here find in Xenophanes a double consciousness; a pure consciousness and consciousness of Being, and a consciousness of opinion. The former was to him the consciousness of the divine, and it is the pure dialectic, which is negatively related to all that is determined and which annuls it. The manner in which he expresses himself towards the sensuous world and finite thought-determinations is seen most clearly in his allusions to the Greek mythological conceptions of the gods. He says, amongst other things, according to Brandis (Comment. Eleat. P. I. p. 68):— “Did beasts and lions only have hands, Works of art thereby to bring forth, as do men, They would, in creating divine forms, give to them What in image and size belongs to themselves.” He also animadverts on the ideas of the gods held by Homer and Hesiod in verses which Sextus (adv. Math. IX. 193) has preserved to us:— “Hesiod and Homer have attached to the gods All that which brings shame and censure to men; Stealing, adultery, and mutual deceit.”