  To sum up: Xenophanes’ attitude toward knowledge appears to have been the product of two distinct impulses. While he believed that inquiry in the form of travel and direct observation was capable of yielding useful information about the nature of things, he remained sufficiently under the influence of an older piety to want to caution others against seeking to understand matters that lay beyond the limits of all human experience. Here, as in other aspects of his thought, Xenophanes stands with one foot in the world of the archaic poet and the other in the “new science” of the late 6th and early 5th centuries BCE