Note 98 — Chapter V · FREETHOUGHT IN GREECE

Setting out on his travels, doubtless, with the Ionian predilection for a unitary philosophy, he had somewhere and somehow attained a pantheism which transcended the concern for a “first principle”—if, indeed, it was essentially distinct from the doctrine of Anaximandros.98 “Looking wistfully upon the whole heavens,” says Aristotle,99 “he affirms that unity is God.” From the scattered quotations which are all that remain of his lost poem, On Nature (or Natural Things),100 it is hard to deduce any full conception of his philosophy; but it is clear that it was monistic; and though most of his later interpreters have acclaimed him as the herald of monotheism, it is only in terms of pantheism that his various utterances can be reconciled. It is clearly in that sense that Aristotle and Plato101 commemorate him as the first of the Eleatic monists. Repeatedly he speaks of “the Gods” as well as of “God”; and he even inculcates the respectful worship of them.102 The solution seems to be that he thinks of the forces and phenomena of Nature in the early way as Gods or Powers, but resolves them in turn into a whole which includes all forms of power and intelligence, but is not to be conceived as either physically or mentally anthropomorphic. “His contemporaries would have been more likely to call Xenophanes an atheist than anything else.”103