Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/342

328 fragment, certainly took it in the sense usually given to it. But it was very natural for him to make this mistake. "The One" was an expression that had two senses in the middle of the fifth century B.C.; it meant either the whole of reality or the point as a spatial unit. To maintain it in the first sense, the Eleatics were obliged to disprove it in the second; and so it sometimes seemed that they were speaking of their own "One" when they really meant the other. We have seen that the very same difficulty was felt about Zeno's denial of the "one."

170. The most remarkable fragment of Melissos is, perhaps, the last (fr. 8). It seems to be directed against Anaxagoras; at least the language seems more applicable to him than any one else. Anaxagoras had admitted (§ 137, fin.) that, so far as our perceptions go, they do not agree with his theory, though he held this was due solely to their weakness. Melissos, taking advantage of this admission, urges that, if we give up the senses as the test of reality, we are not entitled to reject the Eleatic theory. With wonderful penetration he points out that if we are to say, with Anaxagoras, that things are a many, we are bound also to say that each one of them is such as the Eleatics declared the One to be. In other words, the only consistent pluralism is the atomic theory.

Melissos has been unduly depreciated owing to the criticisms of Aristotle; but these, we have seen, are based mainly on a somewhat pedantic objection to the false conversion in the early part of the argument. Melissos knew nothing about the rules of conversion; and he could easily have made his reasoning formally correct without modifying his system. His greatness consisted in this, that not only was he the real systematiser of Eleaticism, but he was also able to see, before the pluralists saw it themselves, the only way in which the theory that things are a many could