country.

His philosophic position was a very simple one. He had nothing to add
to or to vary in the doctrine of Parmenides. His function was
primarily that of an expositor and defender of that doctrine, and his
particular pre-eminence consists in the ingenuity of his dialectic
resources of defence. He is in fact pronounced by Aristotle to have
been the inventor of dialectic or systematic logic. The relation of
{43} the two is humorously expressed thus by Plato (Jowett, _Plato_,
vol. iv. p. 128); "I see, Parmenides, said Socrates, that Zeno is your
second self in his writings too; he puts what you say in another way,
and would fain deceive us into believing that he is telling us what is
new. For you, in your poems, say, All is one, and of this you adduce
excellent proofs; and he, on the other hand, says, There is no many;
and on behalf of this he offers overwhelming evidence." To this Zeno
replies, admitting the fact, and adds: "These writings of mine were
meant to protect the arguments of Parmenides against those who scoff at
him, and show the many ridiculous and contradictory results which they
suppose to follow from the affirmation of the One. My answer is an
address to the partisans of the many, whose attack I return with
interest by retorting upon them that their hypothesis of the being of
many if carried out appears in a still more ridiculous light than the
hypothesis of the being of one."

The arguments of Zeno may therefore be regarded as strictly arguments
_in kind_; quibbles if you please, but in answer to quibbles. The
secret of his method was what Aristotle calls Dichotomy--that is, he
put side by side two contradictory propositions with respect to any
particular supposed real thing in experience, and then proceeded to
show that both these contradictories alike imply what is {44} [105]
inconceivable. Thus "a thing must consist either of a finite number of
parts or an infinite number." Assume the number of parts to be finite.
Between them there must either be something or nothing. If there is
something between them, then the whole consists of more parts than it
consists of. If there is nothing between them, then they are not
separated, therefore they are not parts; therefore the whole has no
parts at all; therefore it is nothing. If, on the other hand, the
number of parts is infinite, then, the same kind of argument being
applied, the magnitude of the whole is by infinite successive positing
of