Page:Our knowledge of the external world.djvu/194

 many C’s, and yet cannot have passed more than one each instant. Hence the number of instants since the motion began is twice the number of A’s passed, though we previously found it was equal to this number. From this result, Zeno’s conclusion follows.

Zeno’s arguments, in some form, have afforded grounds for almost all the theories of space and time and infinity which have been constructed from his day to our own. We have seen that all his arguments are valid (with certain reasonable hypotheses) on the assumption that finite spaces and times consist of a finite number of points and instants, and that the third and fourth almost certainly in fact proceeded on this assumption, while the first and second, which were perhaps intended to refute the opposite assumption, were in that case fallacious. We may therefore escape from his paradoxes either by maintaining that, though space and time do consist of points and instants, the number of them in any finite interval is infinite; or by denying that space and time consist of points and instants at all; or lastly, by denying the reality of space and time altogether. It would seem that Zeno himself, as a supporter of Parmenides, drew the last of these three possible deductions, at any rate in regard to time. In this a very large number of philosophers have followed him. Many others, like M. Bergson, have preferred to deny that space and time consist of points and instants. Either of these solutions will meet the difficulties in the form in which Zeno raised them. But, as we saw, the difficulties can also be met if infinite numbers are admissible. And on grounds which are independent of space and time, infinite numbers, and series in which no two terms are consecutive, must in any case be admitted. Consider, for example, all the fractions less than 1, arranged in order of magnitude.