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The Parmenidean Dogma

Professor W. T. Stace

Philosophy / Volume 24 / Issue 90 / July 1949, pp 195 - 204

DOI: 10.1017/S0031819100007178, Published online: 25 February 2009

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Professor W. T. Stace (1949). The Parmenidean Dogma. Philosophy, 24, pp
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 PHILOSOPHY
THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL INSTITUTE
OF PHILOSOPHY

VOL. XXIV. No. go JULY 1949

THE PARMENIDEAN DOGMA

PROFESSOR W. T. STACE

BY the Parmenidean dogma I mean the proposition that "something

cannot come put of nothing." If you like to add the other half of the
common statement it is that "something cannot become nothing."
But in this paper I shall be thinking mainly of the first proposition.
I call it the Parmenidean dogma because, although it may have
been implicit in much human thought before Parmenides, it was he,
so far as I know, who first made it explicit in the form of an abstract
metaphysical proposition.
Doubtless it originated in some such common experience as that
you cannot get a rabbit out of an empty top-hat, or, since there were
no top-hats in the days of Parmenides, whatever experience corre-
sponded thereto. You cannot get blood out of a stone, you cannot take
the breeches off a highlander, you cannot take money out of an
empty wallet, all these common experiences seem to illustrate the
principle. If anything appears suddenly on the scene, apparently
from nowhere, you ask: where did it come from? It must have been
somewhere all the time. It couldn't have come out of nothing. Just
as the common experiences of stones which are hard and grey, or
leaves which are green and soft, gave rise to the metaphysical concept
of substance, so these other common experiences gave rise to the
Parmenidean dogma. Thus common-sense truths are rashly erected
into universal metaphysical principles of all being. They harden into
dogmas. They solidify into prejudices so deep that in a little while
men say that anything which contradicts them is "inconceivable."
They then become fetters on the human mind prohibiting its advance,
till someone breaks through. This was the history of Euclidean
geometry, as everyone now knows. It was "inconceivable" that two
straight lines should enclose a space, till it was found in Riemannian
geometry that they do.
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 PHILOSOPHY
First, I should like to illustrate the way in which the Parmenidean"
dogma has moulded all European thought,fromthe time of its author
down to the present day. There is scarcely a branch of our common
thinking, or of science, or of philosophy which does not show its
influence. I think that a complete history of the idea, showing how
it has interwoven itself with our culture, fashioned and determined
our entire attitude to the world, would be a fascinating project. Of
course, I cannot undertake anything of that sort here. I will briefly
note only a few of-its most obvious ramifications.
To begin at the beginning. Everyone knows how Parmenides
himself used it, namely, to deny the existence of becoming. Change
always involves the arising of something new, something which
wasn't there before, something therefore which has come out of
nothing. If an object changes from green to red, then the red has
come from nowhere, and the green has disappeared into non-existence.
And as this contradicts the dogma it cannot have happened. It
seems to a modern mind a simple reflection that as a matter of fact
things do change colour, and that therefore, if this contradicts the
dogma, there must be something wrong with the dogma. But this
did not occur to Parmenides, nor apparently to Mr. Bradley
who uses essentially the same argument to prove that change is
unreal.
After Parmenides, everyone knows that his principle determined
the course of subsequent pre-Socratic philosophy, Empedocles,
Anaxagoras, the Atomists. I will pass over that. The next high light
is Aristotle. Everyone knows about that, too. But it is worth a
moment's reflection. Aristotle, as we know, believed he had "solved",
the problem of change—a problem artificially created by the dogma
and otherwise non-existent—by inventing the categories of potenti-
ality and actuality. The rabbit was, by means of these categories,
successfully produced out of the top-hat. This was very awkward
because we had just looked into the top-hat and seen that the rabbit
was not there. There is only one solution. The rabbit was in the hat
all the time. But it wasn't an actual rabbit. It was a potential rabbit.
That is why we couldn't see it when we looked. Potential rabbits are
invisible. In the same way chickens are able to come out of eggs
because they were there all the time, potentially; and oak trees are
able to come out of acorns because they were there all the time,
potentially. You may examine eggs and acorns with the most
powerful microscopes, including electron microscopes, and never find
chickens or oak trees inside them. But this again is because potential
chickens and oak trees are invisible.
We need only reflect on the enormous influence exercised by
Aristotle's concept of potentiality on subsequent thought, in
Aquinas, through the Middle Ages, and down to the present day, to
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 THE PARMENIDEAN DOGMA
see how the Parmenidean dogma has fashioned philosophy. It was
Parmenides who was responsible for potentiality.
Let us glance now at the influence of the dogma in science. Clearly
it produced the scientific maxims of the conservation of matter and
the conservation of energy. These ideas are not empirical generaliza-
tions. They are simply a priori deductions from the dogma. It is
true that no one has ever seen a piece of matter created or annihilated.
So that the conservation of matter has the basis in experience that
it agrees with common observation. It agrees with our observations
on rabbits and the breeches of highlanders. This, as I said before, was
what must have suggested the dogma in the first place. But it is
plain that these observations are an entirely insufficient basis on
which to found a universal principle about the nature of matter
throughout the universe. It is plain that scientists supposed that
matter could neither be created nor destroyed because they supposed
it inconceivable that something could come out of nothing or go into
nothing.
The same is true of the conservation of energy with one extremely
important difference. In this case the principle is not in the least
supported by common observation. On the contrary it is flatly
contradicted by our experience. If you throw a stone up on to a roof,
and it lodges there, you see kinetic energy completely disappearing
out of the world, disappearing into nothing. It was "there"—to use
the vulgar expression—when the stone was in motion on its upward
journey. It ceased to exist when the stone came to rest on the roof,
If a week later the wind blows the stone off the roof and it falls to
the ground energy appears again, out of nothing. Oddly enough, it
is the same quantity of energy which existed when the stone was on
its upward journey. What happened to the energy during the week's
interval? If you consult experience, observation, the answer is that
it had gone out of existence altogether. But this does not square with
dogma. Therefore the scientist invented the fiction of potential
energy—Aristotle's Parmenidean concept—to make it square. Not
only is this concept supported by no evidence whatsoever, but it is
in this case even flatly self-contradictory. For potential energy simply
means energy which is not now energizing. It is non-energetic energy.
In recent physics the separate principles of the conservation of
matter and the conservation of energy have apparently disappeared
—because it is now said that matter turns into energy and energy
into matter. But still following the Parmenidean dogma, they have
been replaced by the single principle of the conservation of matter-
energy.
The dogma also appears to be responsible for a conception which is
universal alike in our common-sense thinking, our science, and our
philosophy. This is the concept of form and matter. We suppose
197
 PHILOSOPHY
that two quite different things are really, in spite of their difference,
the same thing, because one is a different form of the other or because
they are both forms of something underlying. Another variant of the •[
same idea is the notion of "aspects." There are supposed to be
different aspects of the same thing. An empiricist, though he may
admit that such ways of talking are convenient, cannot admit that
they possess truth. For if you say that A and B are two forms of one
thing, then either this one thing is an underlying substratum which
is unempirical; or you must mean that the one thing is A itself or
B itself. But if you say that A is a form of something which is by
hypothesis different from it, namely B, you are talking nonsense.
Red, for instance, cannot be a form of green.
Yet we use this category of form everywhere. Diamond and
charcoal, palpably different things, are said to be forms of carbon.
Heat, light, and electricity are said to be different forms of energy.
How, we may ask, is this the result of the Parmenidean dogma? It
is so for the following reason. Empirically what is observed in the
cases just mentioned is this. The charcoal disappears into nothing,
and the diamond appears from nowhere. The heat disappears out of
existence, and the light Comes out of nothing. The fact that equi-
valences can be set up, so that if heat is replaced by light, the light
can be again replaced by the original amount of heat, in no way affects
this. That is simply part of the. regularity and orderliness in the
changes of the world. But these observed facts contradict the
Parmenidean dogma. Therefore we say that the heat has never gone
out of existence, it has existed all the time, but in another form.
The category of form in this case does the same work as the category
of potentiality in the case of the stone thrown up to the roof. And the
one is as much a fiction as the other. And both fictions have been
developed in our culture in order to square observed facts with the
Parmenidean dogma.
To turn back now from science to philosophy we may briefly note
a few of the other major influences of the dogma. First, it is the basis
of the view, widely held by various philosophers in different times
and countries, that a cause and its effect are identical. We may call
this the identity theory of causation. Since, if all effects were com-
pletely and literally identical with their causes, there would be no
such thing as change in the world—a result which would be much
appreciated by Parmenides, but which most of us cannot accept—
the identity theorists have to say that the effect is only another
"form" of the cause. The Parmenidean origin of the identity theory
thus reveals itself at once. It is supposed that the effect must be
identical with the cause because otherwise we shall have to admit
that something has come to exist in the effect which was not in
existence before, i.e. that something has come out of nothing.
198
 THE PARMENIDEAN DOGMA
A less radical variant of the same theory is that cause and effect,
though they may not be identical, must at least be alike. This is
flatly contradicted by experience since, for example, lightning is
almost totally unlike its effect, thunder, one, being a visual and the
other an auditory phenomenon. Of course, the theory cannot be
made even clear in view of the fact that resemblance is a matter of
degree, so that it is impossible for the theory to say how much
resemblance between cause and effect is required. Probably every-
thing in the universe resembles everything else in some of its charac-
teristics, however much it may be unlike them in others.
This theory, clearly an offshoot of the Parmenidean dogma, is at
the bottom of the baseless objection to Cartesian dualism, that it is
"inconceivable" that mind and matter, one spatial, the other non-
spatial, could influence one another. Why not? Evidently because
they are, on Descartes' account, so very unlike. Thus we see that
Parmenides has a finger even in the pie of the body-mind problem.
Another variant of the influence of the dogma on theories of
causation is Descartes' statement that an effect cannot contain more
"reality" than was contained in its cause. Descartes' question,
"For whence could the effect derive its reality, if not from its cause ?"
is the old question, where did the rabbit come from?
This brings me to the last example I have time to discuss. This is
an idea which is, so far as I can see, one of the main props of what is
known as absolute idealism. The idea is that the higher cannot come
out of the lower. Spiritual values, such as beauty and goodness,
cannot come out of nothing, and thfe would be involved if they came
out of what is lower than themselves. Therefore they must have
always been in existence. They must be eternal. Indeed, on the
Parmenidean view everything must be eternal, since nothing can
ever come into existence. This is in fact the theory of absolute
idealism, since it holds that if anything does come into existence it
cannot be real, but is only an appearance. From this point of view
absolute idealism is in all its expanse nothing but a vast elaboration
of the Parmenidean dogma. But I was talking about its special
theory of value. And I return to that. Beauty or goodness may appear
to arise out of something lower than themselves. But this is im-
possible. There must therefore be an eternal and timeless source of
values. This, of course, is the Absolute.
You point out that all this contradicts plain facts. Does not the
beauty of the rose arise out of the dirt at its roots? Indeed, if you
add dung, which from a value point of view is even more con-
temptible than plain dirt, the beauty of the rose enormously increases.
The facts of evolution, too, contradict the statement that the higher
cannot come out of the lower. For although I am aware that it is
not part of the scientific theory of evolution that man is higher
199
 PHILOSOPHY
than an amoeba; and though I am also aware that it is extremely
difficult to say exactly what we mean by such terms as higher and
lower; yet in spite of this I think we must hold that a man is in some
sense higher than an amoeba. Again, are not geniuses notoriously
often the children of comparatively ordinary parents?
To all this the idealist answer is that the pre-existent values in the
Absolute are invisible like the potential rabbit. For this is what is
meant by saying they are transcendental. Transcendental means not
phenomenal; and not phenomenal means not visible. Of course, if
you give up the Parmenidean dogma, the whole of this cloud-land of
reveries disappears into thin air.
It is now time to look at the dogma itself and see what is to be said
about it. Those who maintain it must hold either that it is an empirical
generalization or that it is a necessary truth. In spite of the fact that
experience, the common experiences with rabbits and bighlanders'
breeches, must have originally suggested it, it cannot possibly be an
empirical generalization. For as we have seen, observed facts con-
tradict it right and left. Therefore it must be a necessary truth, if
it is a truth at all. And I think as a matter of fact it has always
been so regarded by its supporters. Parmenides himself must have
thought this, since he used it to contradict experience. This is an
interesting reflection. For it shows that an idea, even before it has
ever been stated in an abstract form by a philosopher, may already
have hardened in men's minds into a prejudice so deeply rooted
that the philosopher, when he lights upon it, supposes that the
opposite of it is "inconceivable," and so mistakes it for an a priori
proposition. Descartes too evidently regarded his form of it as an
a priori truth which he could therefore take into his system as an
axiom. And I remember to have been astonished to hear a well-
known philosopher in a public lecture at Princeton say without a
blush that to suppose that something could come out of nothing
would be a logical self-contradiction, i.e. that the Parmenidean dogma
is an analytic truth.
I say "astonished," because any competent student of philosophy
ought to know that Hume finally and decisively refuted the view
that it is an analytic truth. This was not a mere opinion of Hume's
to which another philosopher is entitled to oppose an opposite
opinion. It was the definitive settlement of the question.
I am not referring to Hume's famous treatment of the idea of
necessary connection. I should not put his view on that question as
higher than an opinion, although I happen to agree with it. The
question we are discussing has nothing at all to do with necessary
connection. I am referring to Section 3 of Part 3 of the Treatise
entitled "Why a cause is always necessary." Hume's arguments there
are entirely independent of his views on necessary connection and
200
 T H E P A R M E N I D E A N DOGMA
will remain valid even if we reject those views. It is true that Hume
\ does not discuss the proposition "something cannot come out of
nothing." What he discusses is the proposition "whatever begins to
exist must have a cause of existence." I will call this the causal
proposition. I cannot here discuss its exact logical relationship to
the Parmenidean dogma, but will say only that if Hume's proofs
are valid in regard to the one proposition they are valid in regard to
the other. The relevant considerations are identical in the two cases.
Hume produces several refutations of the view that the causal
proposition is an analytic truth. I will reproduce only one of these.
He points out that we can easily imagine—he is using the word in
the strict sense of having a mental image of—we can easily imagine
something coming into existence without a cause. Thus you can
easily imagine a billiard ball suddenly appearing on the table here,
literally beginning to be, without any cause, or if you like, coming
from nowhere. In fairy tales we often do, on the invitation of the
author, imagine such events. Now it is impossible to have an image of
something which is self-contradictory. For instance, you cannot
imagine a round square. Therefore the fact that you can imagine a
. thing or event proves that it is not self-contradictory. Therefore since
you can imagine a thing coming into existence without a cause, this
i proves that it is not self-contradictory. Hence the causal proposition
cannot be an analytic a priori truth.
. Hume might have pointed out that the impossibility of imagining
=? a self-contradictory thing is only a particular case of the more general
j truth that you cannot have any kind of direct or immediate experi-
\ ence of a self-contradictory thing. For instance, a round square could
| not form a part of even a hallucinatory experience, much less of a
^ sense-experience. It is odd that Mr. Bradley did not notice this. If
he had, he would not have written his book. For if it were really the
i case that space, time, motion, etc.," are self-contradictory, this would
| not only prove, as he thought, that they cannot be real; it would
I • prove that they cannot even appear or be experienced in any way.
That they are self-contradictory proves, he thinks, that they are
appearances. What it would actually prove, if it were true, would be
that they could not possibly be appearances, not even hallucinatory
appearances. This oversight is the more odd in view of the long history
of the laws of logic since the time of Aristotle. The law of contradic-
tion has always been regarded as forbidding self-contradictory beings
or events in the common world of existence, in what idealists call
the phenomenal world, not in the world of transcendental reality.
That you cannot both have your cake and eat it is a plain statement
about the world of appearances, about phenomena, not about
noumena. If Bradley were right in thinking that self-contradictory
fc- things can exist in the world of appearance, but not in the world of
201
 PHILOSOPHY
reality, then it ought to be possible both to eat your cake and have
it—on earth, though not apparently ki heaven.
To Hume's proof I will add another of my own. When it is said
that a thing is self-contradictory, this is of course elliptical. Things
cannot contradict themselves or one another. Only propositions can.
So when it is said that a thing is self-contradictory what is meant is
that two contradicting propositions follow from the assertion of its
existence. Therefore if anyone says that something is self-con-
tradictory we ought always to ask him to set out the two contradict-
ing propositions. It follows that, if a thing or event can be completely
described without remainder in a set of propositions none of which
contradicts another one, then the thing or event cannot be self-
contradictory. Now suppose that a thing or event x comes into
existence out of nothing, passes from non-existence to existence, at
time t. This fact can be exhaustively described in only two proposi-
tions, which are (i) that x did not exist before time t, and (2) that *
existed after time t. These propositions do not contradict one another
since they refer to different times. If it were said that x both exists
and does not exist at the same time, this would be self-contradictory.
But to say that it exists at one time, but not at another, contains no
contradiction. Therefore x coming into existence out of nothing is
not self-contradictory.
This argument, can be applied to the causal proposition in the
following manner. Suppose that x came into existence at time t
without a cause. This can be completely described in three proposi-
tions, namely, (1) that x did hot exist before time t, (2) that x existed
after time t, (3) that before time t there was no event which stood in
the causal relation to x. No one of these three propositions contradicts
another one. Therefore the supposition is not self-contradictory.
Thus it is certain that the Parmenidean dogma is not an a priori
analytic truth. The only remaining possible defence of it is that it is
an a priori synthetic truth. This view will not find much favour
nowadays. But this is not decisive against it since current denials
of a priori synthetic truths, might be mistaken. What is decisive,
however, is the following. If there are any a priori synthetic proposi-
tions, they must have the character of necessity which must be
intuitively apparent. For instance, A. C. Ewing holds that the
proposition "a surface cannot be red all over and green all over at
the same time" is a synthetic a priori truth. I will not discuss whether
he is right. But one can see at once that the proposition is at any
rate a necessary one. It bears necessity intuitively on its face. The
only question, of course, is whether it is analytic or synthetic. Thus
if the Parmenidean dogma is an a priori synthetic truth, it must
have the character of being intuitively necessary. But it does not.
No such necessity can be perceived in it. Therefore it is not a synthetic
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 T H E P A R M E N I D E A N DOGMA
a priori proposition. It is true that the necessity of an a priori
proposition may not be immediately intuitable. This is the case with
advanced propositions in mathematics, which are nevertheless a priori
truths, though analytic. But in that case their necessity can always
be shown by a series of steps the necessity of each of which is imme-
diately intuitable. This means that they can be proved. Now no one
has ever suggested that the Parmenidean dogma is of that kind,
that it is reached or reachable by a series of demonstrable steps.
Obviously the claim is that its necessity is immediately intuitable.
But this is simply not the case. If anyone claims that it is, I think
it is certain that his case is like that of a man who might say that the
proposition "the earth is flat" has for him the character of imme-
diately intuitable necessity. I do not know how to argue with such
a person. But it is quite clear that what has happened is that he has
mistaken a psychological feeling of certainty, such as is derived from
a deep-rooted prejudice, for a logical necessity.
We reach the result that the Parmenidean dogma is baseless. What
then? It certainly follows that a vast amount of philosophy based on
it must be rejected—I will not go over the list of such philosophies
again. It does not follow that some of the ideas based on it may not
be useful. Perhaps potential energy may be a useful fiction. It is
necessary if the principle of conservation is to be preserved. And that
principle, though it cannot claim to be an absolute truth, is doubtless
a valuable methodological assumption.
But in general our picture of the world will be changed—and
changed evidently in the direction of a more empirical philosophy.
We shall not invent hidden substances underlying the changes of
things in order to preserve the things from going in and out of
existence. We shall not invent a hidden mysterious energy which
underlies heat, light, and electricity. We shall say that the principle
that they are all "forms" of energy means only that when a given
amount of motion disappears and is replaced by a given amount of
heat, these are equivalents in the sense that the original amount of
motion can be made by suitable means to appear again and displace
the heat.
Finally, it seems to me that recent physics supports the view I am
taking. An electron is said to jump from one orbit to another, without
traversing the intervening distance. To use an illustration of White-
head's, this is as if we should say that an automobile travelling at
thirty miles an hour really appears at one milestone, remains there
for two minutes, disappears from that point and instantaneously
reappears at the next milestone, without travelling the intervening
mile, remains for two minutes at that milestone, and so throughout
its course. This view of the electron traverses the Parmenidean
dogma. For it is merely a matter of language whether we say that
203
 PHILOSOPHY
the electron which appears in the new orbit is the "same" electron
which disappeared from the old orbit or whether we say that the
first electron has ceased to exist and a new one has come into
existence. The two statements are equivalent but employ different
definitions of the word "same." Hence the statement that one electron
has ceased to exist and another has been created out of nothing is
true. Yet it contradicts the Parmenidean dogma. I do not think
this view of the electron in modern physics could have been put
forward unless physics had now tacitly given up the Parmenidean
dogma.
Again action at a distance must, on our view, be conceived as
possible. For there is no contradiction in supposing that a cause
happens here and that its effect takes place a million miles away with
no intervening chain of events. It may be that it is not necessary for
the physicist at present to assert that such a thing ever does take
place. He may prefer to stick to his view that action at a distance
does not occur. But the rejection of the Parmenidean dogma will
mean that his mind is perfectly open to admit action at a distance
if ever the evidence should point to it. He will not say that it is
"impossible" or "inconceivable," though he may say that so far as he
at present knows it does not occur.
In general the moral is: anything whatever can happen—anything
except round squares, two twos making five, or other self-contradic-
tions. It is simply a matter of evidence. I have sometimes been asked
what is the value of empiricism. Sometimes I am afraid it is used to
rule out possibilities. Sometimes it appears as a narrowing influence.
But its true function is to free the mind from prejudices, to free us
from the bondage of supposing that our prejudices are laws of the
universe. Instead of narrowing our view-point, it should open our
minds and our imaginations to the possibilities of new paths and
hitherto undreamed of progress in knowledge. It should strike off
many ancient fetters from our minds.

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