[Footnote 450: ][ (return) ] Ritter's "History of Ancient Philosophy," vol. i. pp. 447, 451.
[Footnote 451: ][ (return) ] Id., ib., vol. i. pp. 450, 455.
Lewes asserts that "Parmenides did not, with Xenophanes, call 'the One' God; he called it Being. [452] In support of this statement he, however, cites no ancient authorities. We are therefore justified in rejecting his opinion, and receiving the testimony of Simplicius, "the only authority for the fragments of the Eleatics," [453] and who had a copy of the philosophic poems of Parmenides. He assures us that Parmenides and Xenophanes "affirmed that 'the One,' or unity, was the first Principle of all,....they meaning by this One that highest or supreme God, as being the cause of unity to all things.... It remaineth, therefore, that that Intelligence which is the cause of all things, and therefore of mind and understanding also, in which all things are comprehended in unity, was Parmenides' one Ens or Being. [454] Parmenides was, therefore, a spiritualistic or idealistic Pantheist.
Zeno of Elea (born B.C. 500) was the logician of the Eleatic school. He was, says Diogenes Laertius, "the inventor of Dialectics." [455] Logic henceforth becomes the ὄργανον [456]--organon of the Eleatics.
[Footnote 452: ][ (return) ] "Biographical History of Philosophy," p. 50.
[Footnote 453: ][ (return) ] Encyclopædia Britannica, article "Simplicius."
[Footnote 454: ][ (return) ] Cudworth's "Intellectual System," vol. i. p. 511.
[Footnote 455: ][ (return) ] "Lives," p. 387 (Bohn's edition).
[Footnote 456: ][ (return) ] Plato in "Parmen."
This organon, however, Zeno used very imperfectly. In his hands it was simply the "reductio ad absurdum" of opposing opinions as the means of sustaining the tenets of his own sect. Parmenides had asserted, on à priori grounds, the existence of "the One." Zeno would prove by his dialectic the non-existence of "the many." His grand position was that all phenomena, all that appears to sense, is but a modification of the absolute One. And he displays a vast amount of dialectic subtilty in the effort to prove that all "appearances" are unreal, and that all movement and change is a mere "seeming"--not a reality. What men call motion is only a name given to a series of conditions, each of which, considered separately, is rest. "Rest is force resistant; motion is force triumphant." [457] The famous puzzle of "Achilles and the Tortoise," by which he endeavored to prove the unreality of motion, has been rendered familiar to the English reader. [458]