XENCIPEANES, founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, was b. at Colophon, in Asia Minor, about 580 n.e., or, according to others, about 40 years earlier. He spent the greater part of a life which was prolonged beyond his 90th year, in banishment. He passed many years in Sicily, and resided for some time at Elea (whence adj. Eleatic), in Lucania. He composed many poems, historical, didactic, and elegiac, which have all perished, except a few fria,gments. He employed his poetry as the instrument for disseminating his philosophical tenets. He was the first to maintain the Eleatic doc trine of the oneness of the universe; and recognizing clearly the unity and perfection of the Deity, he attacked the prevalent mythology and the practice of attributing to the godhead a human form and human weaknesses. He was thoroughly in earnest, but his logic was confused and contradictory. While he held the existent to be identical with the Deity, and regarded it as the basis of phenomena, he also maintained that the divine essence was neither finite nor infinite, neither moved nor unmoved: not finite, for then it must be limited by another, whereas God is one; nor, on the other hand, infinite, for only non-being is infinite, as having neither beginning, middle, nor end. The distin
guishing tenet of Xenophanes is his monotheism; and as a philosophical rhapsodist, he sought to inculcate it, though he failed to express it in a clear and systematic manner. His speculations are skeptical in their tendency, and appear to have had great influence upon succeeding philosophers. His explanations of physical phenomena were crude; but one is recorded in which he has anticipated modern geology. From the shells and marine petrifactions found on mountains and in quarries, he inferred that the surface of the earth had risen gradually out of the sea. In the 18th c., Voltaire could give no bet ter explanation of the fact of seashells being found on the mountains of Spain. than the supposition that they were the scallop-shells dropped by pilgrims journeying to and from the shrine of St. James.