If, indeed, we judge the question, not from their standing-point, but from our own, we shall solve the difficulty by adopting the last-mentioned answer. We shall admit that One and Many are predicates which do not necessarily exclude each other; but we shall refrain from affirming or denying either of them respecting the Real, the Absolute, the Unconditioned. Of an object absolutely one and continuous — or of objects absolutely many and discontinuous, apart from the facts of our own sense and consciousness, and independent of any sentient subject — we neither know nor can affirm anything. Both these predicates (One — Many) are relative and phenomenal, grounded on the facts and comparisons of our own senses and consciousness, and serving only to describe, to record, and to classify, those facts. Discrete quantity or number, or succession of distinct unities — continuous quantity, or motion and extension — are two conceptions derived from comparison, abstracted and generalised from separate particular phenomena of our consciousness; the continuous, from our movements and the consciousness of persistent energy involved therein — the discontinuous, from our movements, intermitted and renewed, as well as from our impressions of sense. We compare one discrete quantity with another, or one continual quantity with another, and we thus ascertain many important truths: but we select our unit, or our standard of motion and extension, as we please, or according to convenience, subject only to the necessity of adapting our ulterior calculations consistently to this unit, when once selected. The same object may thus be considered sometimes as one, sometimes as many; both being relative, and depending upon our point of view. Motion, Space, Time, may be considered either as continuous or as discontinuous: we may reason upon them either as one or the other, but we must not confound the two points of view with each other. When, however, we are called upon to travel out of the Relative, and to decide between Parmenides and his opponents — whether the Absolute be One or Multitudinous — we have only to abstain from affirming either, or (in other words) to confess our ignorance. We know nothing of an absolute, continuous, self-existent One, or of an absolute, discontinuous Many.
Zeno did not deny motion as a fact, phenomenal and relative.
Some critics understand Zeno to have denied motion as a fact — opposing sophistical reasoning to certain and familiar experience. Upon this view is founded the well-known anecdote, that Diogenes the Cynic refuted the argument by getting up and walking. But I do not so construe the scope of his argument. He did not deny motion as a fact. It rested with him on the evidence of sense, acknowledged by every one. It was therefore only a phenomenal fact relative to our consciousness, sensation, movements, and comparisons. As such, but as such only, did Zeno acknowledge it. What he denied was, motion as a fact belonging to the Absolute, or as deducible from the Absolute. He did not deny the Absolute or Thing in itself, as an existing object, but he struck out variety, divisibility, and motion, from the list of its predicates. He admitted only the Parmenidean Ens, one, continuous, unchanged, and immovable, with none but negative predicates, and severed from the relative world of experience and sensation.
Gorgias the Leontine — did not admit the Absolute, even as conceived by Parmenides.
Other reasoners, contemporary with Zeno, did not agree with him, in admitting the Absolute, even as an object with no predicates, except unity and continuity. They denied it altogether, both as substratum and as predicate. To establish this negation is the purpose of a short treatise ascribed to the rhetor or Sophist Gorgias, a contemporary of Zeno; but we are informed that all the reasonings, which Gorgias employed, were advanced, or had already been advanced, by others before him.[30] Those reasonings are so imperfectly preserved, that we can make out little more than the general scope.
[30] See the last words of the Aristotelian or Pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, De Melisso, Xenophane et Gorgiâ, p. 980.
Ἅπασαι δὲ αὖται καὶ ἑτέρων ἀρχαιοτέρων εἰσὶν ἀπόριαι, ὥστε ἐν τῇ περὶ ἐκείνων σκέψει καὶ ταύτας ἐξεταστέον.
Ἅπασαι is the reading of Mullach in his edition of this treatise (p. 79), in place of ἅπαντες or ἅπαντα.
His reasonings against the Absolute, either as Ens or Entia.
Ens, or Entity per se (he contended), did not really exist. Even granting that it existed, it was unknowable by any one. And even granting that it both existed, and was known by any one, still such person could not communicate his knowledge of it to others.[31]