EL DORADO, the name given by the Spaniards to an imaginary country, sup posed in the 10th century to be situated in the interior of South America, between the rivers Oronneo and Amazon, said, as the name implied, abounding in gold and all manner of precious stones. After the Spanish of' Mexico and Peru, the most exaggerated accounts of the wealth and riches of the newly acquired territory were circulated and believed. A new region was fabled to exist far surpassing the wealth and splendor of Peru; expeditions were fitted out for the purpose of discovering it ; and though all such attempts proved abortive, the rumors of its existence continual to be helieve,1 down to the beginning of last cent try. The term then passed into the language of poetry, in which it was used to express a land of boundless wealth and felicity, like the ancient Elysium or the Mohammedan Paradise ; until the recent discoveries in California gave that coun try a fresh claim to the appellation.
ELEAr IC PIIILOS'OPlIY, a system owing its origin to Xenophanes, a native of Elea (in Latin re/ia,) who lived about the year B . C. 530. The most celebrated of his followers were Pa•menides and Zeno, also natives of Elea. The dialectical character of the principal systems of an tiquity may be said to owe its existence to the Eleatics. The tendency of their speculations was the direct contrary of that which di.stingniihes the Ionic school. While the latter fixed their attention on outward nature, and strove to discover the laws which regulate its progress, Xenophanes and his disciples confined their thoughts to what they conceived to be the only objects of real knowledge— the ideas of God, or Being as it is in it self. The world of succession and change,
which they designated under the title of that 'which becomes (rd yul,amrpopo they held to be utterly vain and illusory; the very conception of change itself seeming to them to involve a contradiction. Time, space and motion they regarded as mere phantasms, generated by the deceiving senses, and incapable of scientific expla nation. They were consequently led to distinguish between the pure reason, the correlative of Being, and in one sense identical with it, and opinion or common understanding, the faculty which judges according, to the impressions of sense. Parmenides, in particular, was the author of a philosophical epic, the two hooks of which treated respectively of these two modes of thinking. For a full account of all that can he gat hered from remain ing fragments of this rigid system of ra tionalism, the reader must consult the German writers on the subject : in par ticular Brandis and Ritter, in their his tories of philosophy. Frequent allusion is made both by Plato and Aristotle to the Eleatic doctrines, the authors of which are mentioned by both those philosophers in terms of evident respect and veneration. Plato has made their system the subject of a whole dialogue, entitled the Par ra en ides ; perhaps the most striking spe cimen of dialectic subtlety which Grecian philosophy affords.