Note (return) — Chapter IX

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