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THREE:Designing is in many respects the same thing as invention, except that it deals more with mechanism than principles, although it may, and often does include both. Like invention, designing should always be attempted for the attainment of some definite object laid down at the beginning, and followed persistently throughout.

THREE:As might be expected, the Parmenidean paradoxes provoked a considerable amount of contradiction and ridicule. The Reids and Beatties of that time drew sundry absurd consequences from the new doctrine, and offered them as a sufficient refutation of its truth. Zeno, a young friend and20 favourite of Parmenides, took up arms in his master’s defence, and sought to prove with brilliant dialectical ability that consequences still more absurd might be deduced from the opposite belief. He originated a series of famous puzzles respecting the infinite divisibility of matter and the possibility of motion, subsequently employed as a disproof of all certainty by the Sophists and Sceptics, and occasionally made to serve as arguments on behalf of agnosticism by writers of our own time. Stated generally, they may be reduced to two. A whole composed of parts and divisible ad infinitum must be either infinitely great or infinitely little; infinitely great if its parts have magnitude, infinitely little if they have not. A moving body can never come to the end of a given line, for it must first traverse half the line, then half the remainder, and so on for ever. Aristotle thought that the difficulty about motion could be solved by taking the infinite divisibility of time into account; and Coleridge, according to his custom, repeated the explanation without acknowledgment. But Zeno would have refused to admit that any infinite series could come to an end, whether it was composed of successive or of co-existent parts. So long as the abstractions of our understanding are treated as separate entities, these and similar puzzles will continue to exercise the ingenuity of metaphysicians. Our present business, however, is not to solve Zeno’s difficulties, but to show how they illustrate a leading characteristic of Greek thought, its tendency to perpetual analysis, a tendency not limited to the philosophy of the Greeks, but pervading the whole of their literature and even of their art. Homer carefully distinguishes the successive steps of every action, and leads up to every catastrophe by a series of finely graduated transitions. Like Zeno, again, he pursues a system of dichotomy, passing rapidly over the first half of his subject, and relaxes the speed of his narrative by going into ever-closer detail until the consummation is reached. Such a poem as the ‘Achilleis’ of modern critics21 would have been perfectly intolerable to a Greek, from the too rapid and uniform march of its action. Herodotus proceeds after a precisely similar fashion, advancing from a broad and free treatment of history to elaborate minuteness of detail. So, too, a Greek temple divides itself into parts so distinct, yet so closely connected, that the eye, after separating, as easily recombines them into a whole. The evolution of Greek music tells the same tale of progressive subdivision, which is also illustrated by the passage from long speeches to single lines, and from these again to half lines in the dialogue of a Greek drama. No other people could have created mathematical demonstration, for no other would have had skill and patience enough to discover the successive identities interposed between and connecting the sides of an equation. The dialectic of Socrates and Plato, the somewhat wearisome distinctions of Aristotle, and, last of all, the fine-spun series of triads inserted by Proclus between the superessential One and the fleeting world of sense,—were all products of the same fundamental tendency, alternately most fruitful and most barren in its results. It may be objected that Zeno, so far from obeying this tendency, followed a diametrically opposite principle, that of absolutely unbroken continuity. True; but the ‘Eleatic Palamedes’ fought his adversaries with a weapon wrested out of their own hands; rejecting analysis as a law of real existence, he continued to employ it as a logical artifice with greater subtlety than had ever yet been displayed in pure speculation.18 CHAPTER VIII

THREE:So much only is established in the Physics. Further particulars are given in the twelfth book of the Metaphysics. There we learn that, all movement being from possibility to actuality, the source of movement must be a completely realised actuality—pure form without any admixture of matter. But the highest form known to us in the ascending scale of organic life is the human soul, and the highest function of soul is reason. Reason then must be that which moves without being moved itself, drawing all things upwards and onwards by the love which its perfection inspires. The eternal, infinite, absolute actuality existing beyond the outermost starry sphere is God. Aristotle describes God as the thought which thinks itself and finds in the simple act of self-consciousness an everlasting happiness, wonderful if it always equals the best moments of our mortal life, more wonderful still if it surpasses them. There is only one supreme God, for plurality is due to an admixture of matter, and He is pure form. The rule of many is not good, as Homer says. Let there be one Lord.Both friends and cities and confederates,

THREE:The principle upon which steam-engines operate may be briefly explained as follows:—

THREE:And the answer was:"I am getting to be myself again," he croaked. "You have got the better of me this time, but it will never happen again. Ah, you are keen and you are clever, but the old wolf is ever wiser than the young one. I have been robbed."