(_α_) In this way the exposition of the Eleatic philosophy in the poems of Xenophanes and Parmenides still remains poetic in form; and this is exceptionally so in the introduction prefaced by the latter to his work. The content is here the One, which, in its contrast to the Becoming or the already Become, all particular phenomena in short, is eternal and imperishable. No particularity is permitted to bring content to the human spirit, which strives after truth, and, in the first instance, is cognizant of the same in its most abstract unity and concreteness. Expatiating in the greatness of this object, and wrestling with the might of the same, the impulse of soul inclines instinctively to the lyrical expression, although the entire explication of the truths into which the writer's thought here penetrates carries on its face a wholly practical and thereby epic character. (_β_) It is, _secondly_, the _becoming_ of objective things, in particular natural objects, the press and conflict of activities operative in Nature, which supplies the matter of the cosmogonies, and impels the poetic imagination to disclose in the still more concrete and opulent mode of actions and events real eventuality. And the way this faculty does this is by clothing the forces of Nature in relatively more or less personified or figurative images placed in distinct stages, and through the symbolical form of human events and actions. Such a type of epic content and exposition pre-eminently belongs to Oriental Nature-religions; and above all among them the poetry of India is to an excessive degree prolific in the invention and portrayal of such modes of conception, frequently of an unbridled and extravagant type, concerning the origin of the world and the powers that are active therein.