Some critics understand Zeno to have denied motion as a fact--opposing sophistical reasoning to certain and familiar experience. Upon this view is founded the well-known anecdote, that Diogenes the Cynic refuted the argument by getting up and walking. But I do not so construe the scope of his argument. He did not deny motion as a fact. It rested with him on the evidence of sense, acknowledged by every one. It was therefore only a phenomenal fact relative to our consciousness, sensation, movements, and comparisons. As such, but as such only, did Zeno acknowledge it. What he denied was, motion as a fact belonging to the Absolute, or as deducible from the Absolute. He did not deny the Absolute or Thing in itself, as an existing object, but he struck out variety, divisibility, and motion, from the list of its predicates. He admitted only the Parmenidean Ens, one, continuous, unchanged, and immovable, with none but negative predicates, and severed from the relative world of experience and sensation. [Side-note: Gorgias the Leontine--did not admit the Absolute, even as conceived by Parmenides.] Other reasoners, contemporary with Zeno, did not agree with him, in admitting the Absolute, even as an object with no predicates, except unity and continuity. They denied it altogether, both as substratum and as predicate. To establish this negation is the purpose of a short treatise ascribed to the rhetor or Sophist Gorgias, a contemporary of Zeno; but we are informed that all the reasonings, which Gorgias employed, were advanced, or had already been advanced, by others before him.[30] Those reasonings are so imperfectly preserved, that we can make out little more than the general scope. [Footnote 30: See the last words of the Aristotelian or Pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, De Melisso, Xenophane et Gorgiâ, p. 980. [Greek: A(/pasai de\ au)=tai kai\ e(te/rôn a)rchaiote/rôn ei)si\n a)po/riai, ô(/ste e)n tê=| peri\ e)kei/nôn ske/psei kai\ tau/tas e)xetaste/on]. [Greek: A(/pasai] is the reading of Mullach in his edition of this treatise (p. 79), in place of [Greek: a(/pantes] or [Greek: a(/panta].] [Side-note: His reasonings against the Absolute, either as Ens or Entia.] Ens, or Entity _per se_ (he contended), did not really exist. Even granting that it existed, it was unknowable by any one. And even granting that it both existed, and was known by any one, still such person could not communicate his knowledge of it to others.[31] [Footnote 31: See the treatise of Aristotle or Pseudo-Aristotle, De Melisso, Xenophane, et Gorgiâ, in Aristot. p. 979-980, Bekker, also in Mullach's edition, p. 62-78. The argument of Gorgias is also abridged by Sextus Empiric. adv. Mathemat. vii. p. 384, sect. 65-86. See also a copious commentary on the Aristotelian treatise in Foss, De Gorgiâ Leontino, p. 115 seq. The text of the Aristotelian treatise is so corrupt as to be often unintelligible.]