n).]

[Footnote 456: 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 _a
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]

[Footnote 457: Lewes's "Biographical History of Philosophy," p. 60.]

[Footnote 458: Ritter's "History of Ancient Philosophy," vol. i. pp.
475, 476.]

Aristotle assures us that Zeno, "by his one Ens, which neither was moved
nor movable, meaneth God." And he also informs us that "Zeno endeavored
to demonstrate that there is but one God, from the idea which all men
have of him, as that which is the best, supremest, most powerful of all,
or an absolutely perfect being" ("De Xenophane, Zenone, et
Gorgia").[459]

With Zeno we close our survey of the second grand line of independent
inquiry by which philosophy sought to solve the problem of the universe.
The reader will be struck with the resemblance which subsists between
the history of its development and that of the modern Idealist school.
Pythagoras was the Descartes, Parmenides the Spinoza, and Zeno the Hegel
of the Italian school.

In this survey of the speculations of the pre-Socratic schools of
philosophy, we have followed the course of two opposite streams of
thought which had their common origin in one fundamental principle or
law of the human mind--the _intuition of unity_--"or the desire to
comprehend all the facts of the universe in a single formula, and
consummate all conditional knowledge in the unity of unconditioned
existence." The history of this tendency is, in fact, the history of all
philosophy. "The end of all philosophy," says Plato, "is the intuition
of unity." "A