those unprofitable queries which hang about the notions of matter and
time and space, their divisibility and the like, seemed to be stirring
together, under the utterance of this brilliant, phenomenally clever,
perhaps insolent, young man, his master's favourite. To the work of
that grave master, nevertheless--of Parmenides--a very different person
certainly from his rattling disciple, Zeno's [32] seemingly so
fantastic doctrine was sincerely in service. By its destructive
criticism, its dissipation of the very conceivability of the central
and most incisive of sensible phenomena, it was a real support to
Parmenides in his assertion of the nullity of all that is but
phenomenal, leaving open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might say)
to that which really is. That which is, so purely, or absolutely, that
it is nothing at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:--Parmenides
and the Eleatic School were much occupied with the determination of the
thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to that.

Motion discredited, motion gone, all was gone that belonged to an
outward and concrete experience, thus securing exclusive validity to
the sort of knowledge, if knowledge it is to be called, which
corresponds to the "Pure Being," that after all is only definable as
"Pure Nothing," that colourless, formless, impalpable existence (ousia
achromatos, aschematistos, anaphes)+ to use the words of Plato, for whom
Parmenides became a sort of inspired voice. Note at times, in reading
him, in the closing pages of the fifth book of The Republic for
instance, the strange accumulation of terms derivative from the
abstract verb "To be." As some more modern metaphysicians have done,
even Plato seems to pack such terms together almost by rote. Certainly
something of paradox may always be felt even in his [33] exposition of
"Being," or perhaps a kind of paralysis of speech--aphasia.+