a tortoise"—"the flying arrow rests." And generally the impossibility of motion is the leading paradox in the philosophy of Zeno. I may touch upon some of these hereafter: meanwhile, I shall make a few remarks on the principle on which he founds, and on the difference between him and Parmenides.
27. The only difference between Parmenides and Zeno seems to be this, that the one of them argued the affirmative and the other the negative side of the same question. Parmenides took the affirmative side, and argued that Being, the one alone, truly existed. Zeno took the opposite side, and argued that not-Being, the many, had no true existence. The dialectical movement of thought, namely, the opposition between the one and the many, Being and not-Being carried to an extreme, this is, of course, in both cases the same. But if we are to make a distinction between the procedure of Parmenides and that of Zeno, the distinction which I have now pointed out to you is the one which we must draw.
28. In what I have as yet said I am not sure that I have quite reached the ultimate foundation on which the Eleatic philosophy rests. At least I am not sure that I have given it sufficient prominence, or distinguished it with sufficient clearness from the collateral considerations that went along with it. I shall now attempt to make these ultimate points clear, because it is only by getting thoroughly to the
