"unitarian." He accepts only one God, and of all the ancient philosophers
appears to be the most opposed to mythology, to belief in a multiplicity of
gods resembling men, a doctrine which he despises as being immoral. There
is one God, eternal, immutable, immovable, who has no need to transfer
Himself from one locality to another, who is _without place_, and who
governs all things by His thought alone.

Advancing further, Parmenides told himself that if He alone really exists
who is one and eternal and unchangeable, all else is not only inferior to
Him, but is only a _semblance_, and that mankind, earth, sky, plants,
and animals are only a vast illusion--phantoms, a mirage, which would
disappear, which would no longer exist, and _would never have existed_
if we could perceive the Self-existent.

ZENO; DEMOCRITUS.--Zeno of Elea, who must be mentioned more
especially because he was the master of that Gorgias of whom Socrates was
the adversary, was pre-eminently a subtle dialectician in whom the sophist
already made his appearance, and who embarrassed the Athenians by captious
arguments, at the bottom of which always could be found this fundamental
principle: apart from the Eternal Being all is only semblance; apart from
Him who is all, all is nothing.

Democritus of Abdera, disciple of Leucippus of Abdera (about whom nothing
is known), is the inventor of the theory of atoms. Matter is composed of an
infinite number of tiny indivisible bodies which are called atoms; these
atoms from all eternity, or at least since the commencement of matter, have
been endued with certain movements by which they attach themselves to one
another, and agglomerate or separate, and thence is caused the formation of
all things, and the destruction, which is only the disintegration, of all
things. The soul itself is only an aggregation of specially tenuous and