Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/139

84 which I spoke, namely, the changeable. What does this school of philosophy say about that? Change or "motion" (which was the generic word usually employed by the older systems to denote every species of change), this was too obtrusive and prominent a feature in the constitution of things to be overlooked. It is in dealing with this question that the dialectical, i.e., the logical and metaphysical, character of the Eleatic school reveals itself. It is here for the first time that the dialectical movement of human thought comes distinctly into play. In the Ionic school the adjustment of the relation between the unchangeable and the changeable was not attempted at all, or attempted after the crudest fashion. In the Pythagorean school the conciliation of the one and the many was rather taken for granted than discussed and explained. They either ignored or touched but lightly on the problem and the difficulties which it involved. The Eleatics, I say, were the first who seriously addressed themselves to its consideration. And it is on this account, in part at least, that their school has been characterised as dialectical or logical and metaphysical, while the Ionics were characterised as physical, and the Pythagoreans as arithmetical and mathematical.

9. When we take up this question—the question in regard to the relation between the unchangeable and the changeable, the one and the many—what first strikes us is the repugnancy of the two terms