ors, of the trustworthiness
of sensation. His argument is as follows: "If there were many real
existences, to each of them the same reasonings must apply as I have
already used with reference to the one existence. That is to say, if
earth really exists, and water and air and iron and gold and fire and
things living and things dead; and black and white, and all the various
things whose reality men ordinarily assume,--if all these really exist,
and our sight and our hearing give us _facts_, then each of these as
{50} really existing must be what we concluded the one existence must
be; among other things, each must be unchangeable, and can never become
other than it really is. But assuming that sight and hearing and
apprehension are true, we find the cold becoming hot and the hot
becoming cold; the hard changes to soft, the soft to hard; the living
thing dies; and from that which is not living, a living thing comes
into being; in short, everything changes, and what now is in no way
resembles what was. It follows therefore that we neither see nor
apprehend realities.

"In fact we cannot pay the slightest regard to experience without being
landed in self-contradictions. We assume that there are all sorts of
really existing things, having a permanence both of form and power, and
yet we imagine these very things altering and changing according to
what we from time to time see about them. If they were realities as we
first perceived them, our sight must now be wrong. For if they were
real, they could not change. Nothing can be stronger than reality.
Whereas to suppose it changed, we must affirm that the real has ceased
to be, and that that which was not has displaced it."

To Melissus therefore, as to his predecessors, the world of sense was a
world of illusion; the very first principles or assumptions of which,
as of the truthfulness of the senses and the reality of the various
objects which we see, are unthinkable and absurd.

{51}

The weakness as well as the strength of the Eleatic position consisted
in its purely negative and critical attitude. The assumptions of
ordinary life and experience could not stand for a moment when assailed
in detail by their subtle analysis. So-called facts were like a world
of ghosts, which the sword of truth passed through without resistance.
But somehow the sword might pierce them through and through, and show
by all manner of arguments their unsubstantiality, but there they wer