Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/367

ZEXO 345 His appearance constitutes a remarkable era in Grecir.n philos- ophy, because he first brought out the extraordinary aggressive or negative force of the dialectic method. In this discussion re- specting the One and the Many, positive grounds on either side were alike scanty : each party had to set forth the contradictions deducible from the opposite hypothesis, and Zeno professed to show that those of his opponents were the more flagrant. We thus see that, along with the methodized question and answer, or dialectic method, employed from henceforward more and more in philosophical inquiries, comes out at the same time the negative tendency, the probing, testing, and scrutinizing force, of Grecian speculation. The negative side of Grecian speculation stands quite as prominently marked, and occupies as large a measure of the intellectual force of their philosophers, as the positive side. It is not simply to arrive at a conclusion, sustained by a certain measure of plausible premise, and then to proclaim it as an authoritative dogma, silencing or disparaging all objectors, that Grecian speculation aspires. To unmask not only positive false- hood, but even affirmation without evidence, exaggerated confi- dence in what was only doubtful, and show of knowledge without the reality ; to look at a problem on all sides, and set forth all the difficulties attending its solution, to take account of deductions from the affirmative evidence, even in the case of conclusions accepted as true upon the balance, all this will be found pervad- ing the march of their greatest thinkers. As a condition of all progressive philosophy, it is not less essential that the grounds of negation should be freely exposed, than the grounds of affirma- tion. We shall find the two going hand in hand, and the nega- tive vein, indeed, the more impressive and characteristic of the two, from Zeno downwards in our history. In one of the earliest memoranda illustrative of Grecian dialectics, the sentences in which Plato rep/esents Parmenides and Zeno as bequeathing their mantle to the youthful Sokrates, and giving him precepts for successfully prosecuting those researches which his marked inquisitive impulse promised, this large and comprehensive could not have been a pupil of Xenophanes : we should thus be compelled to admit, which perhaps is the truth, that he learned ihe doctrine of Xeno- phanes at second-hand. 15*