[Footnote 28: Aristotel. Physic. vi. 9, p. 239 b. [Greek: Zê/nôn de\ paralogi/zetai; ou) ga\r su/gketai o( chro/nos e)k tô=n nu=n o)/ntôn tô=n a)diaire/tôn, ô(/sper ou)d' a)/llo me/gethos ou)de/n] &c. Aristotle, in the second and third chapters of his Physica, canvasses and refutes the doctrine of Parmenides and Zeno respecting Ens and Unum. He maintains that Ens and Unum are equivocal--[Greek: pollachô=s lego/mena]. He farther maintained that no one before him had succeeded in refuting Zeno. See the Scholia of Alexander ad Sophistic. Elench. p. 320 b. 6, ed. Brandis.] [Side-note: Zenonian Dialectic--Platonic Parmenides.] Though we have not the advantage of seeing the Zenonian dialectics as they were put forth by their author, yet if we compare the substance of them as handed down to us, with those dialectics which form the latter half of the Platonic dialogue called Parmenides, we shall find them not inferior in ingenuity, and certainly more intelligible in their purpose. Zeno furnishes no positive support to the Parmenidean doctrine, but he makes out a good negative case against the counter-doctrine. [Side-note: Views of historians of philosophy respecting Zeno.] Zeller and other able modern critics, while admitting the reasoning of Zeno to be good against this counter-doctrine, complain that he takes it up too exclusively; that One and Many did not exclude each other, and that the doctrines of Parmenides and his opponents were both true together, but neither of them true to the exclusion of the other. But when we reflect that the subject of predication on both sides was the Real (Ens _per se_) it was not likely that either Parmenides or his opponents would affirm it to be both absolutely One and Continuous, and absolutely Many and Discontinuous.[29] If the opponents of Parmenides had taken this ground, Zeno need not have imagined deductions for the purpose of showing that their hypothesis led to contradictory conclusions; for the contradictions would have stood avowedly registered in the hypothesis itself. If a man affirms both at once, he divests the predication of its absolute character, as belonging unconditionally to Ens _per se_; and he restricts it to the phenomenal, the relative, the conditioned--dependent upon our sensations and our fluctuating point of view. This was not intended either by Parmenides or by his opponents. [Footnote 29: That both of them could not be true respecting Ens _per se_, seems to have been considered indisputable. See the argument of Sokrates in the Parmenides of Plato, p. 129 B-E.] [Side-note: Absolute and relative--the first unknowable.]