Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/181

FIFTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY 157 How the deceit comes, how the unchanging One can de- ceive, and who there is to be deceived, he does not tell us, though he does in the second part of his poem (see p. 75) give us ^Uhe Way of Falsehood," explaining how the mirage works, and what contradictions are necessarily- involved in a belief in it. This last line of thought is especially followed by Parmenides's disciple Zeno, who develops the antinomies and inherent contradictions involved in the conceptions of Time, Space, and Number. If the doctrine of the One is hard, he argues, consistent belief in the Multiplicity of things is flatly impossible. Greek speculation thus reaches a point where two more or less consistent roads of thought have led to diametrically opposite conclusions — the One Unchange- able Being of Parmenides ; the ceaseless Becoming of Heraclitus. The difficulty first emerges in the case of Melissos, the Samian admiral who once defeated Pericles ; he tried to make the One into a Milesian ' Arche,' but found it would not work : you could not possibly develop the one datum of pure thought into an account of the facts of the world. After Melissos the breach is more consciously felt. On the one side, starting from Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans seek the Real, the thing that Is eternally, in the unchanging laws of the Flow ; that is, in proportion, in the eternal facts of Number. Geometry is the truth of which the par- ticular square, round, or triangular objects are imperfect and passing instances ; the laws of harmony are the ' truth ' of music, and abstract astronomy the ' truth ' of the shifting stars. Thus in Number they found the real essence of the world, a One, eternal and unchangeable, which would fairly satisfy Parmenides's requirements. 12