The founder of the great school of Elea, an old Greek colony of Ionians in the Italian bay south of Pæstum, was Xenophanes, whose main feature was a bold criticism of the popular theology, as represented by the poetry of Homer. He could easily show the moral defects of the denizens of the Homeric Olympus, and hence inferring their unreality, he pressed home the great doctrine of the unity of the universe, whether ideal or real, and the identification of the Maker (if there ever was a Maker) with his work--a theory which has existed from that day to this under the name of Pantheism, and as such has fascinated the higher spirits even among the cold and practical Anglo-Saxons. This feeling of unity in all the world with the Eternal Cause of the world has indeed appeared in the far East in other and strange systems of philosophy; but never was the doctrine discussed with such variety as among the Greeks. Lofty poetry, hard logic, bitter controversy were all called in to support it, and among a clear-sighted, sceptical race, like the Greeks, so vague and transcendent a theory is far more striking and therefore more fruitful in its spiritual consequences, than when professed by mere ascetics or anchorites who have no contact with common life, and who will not condescend to argument. The Greek Pantheists of the early period were men of high character in public life, respected for their practical wisdom and their literary eminence, and it was they that forced upon the world the astounding theory that not only are all the data of our senses illusory and vain, but that even the assumption of any number of original elements or substances is idle, and must terminate in the great _One_, which embraces them all, and merges gods and men, matter and mind, into that all-embracing Single Being, of whom a forgotten mystic in a later age (but still a Greek) has used this tremendous metaphor: the “gods are his laughter, the race of mortal men his tears.” The positive side of the doctrine was mainly due to Parmenides, of whom Plato speaks with greater respect than of any other thinker except Socrates, and it was clearly a further development, or urging to their extreme consequences, of the older theories which reduced all the various qualities of the world of sense to the manifestations of a single substance. But they had each made some one reservation and upheld one of the data of the senses, but each a different one. Was not therefore the inference clear that this was but a half-way house, and that what we call mind and matter are after all not radically distinct but only separate aspects of the primeval one?