To understand these nine Demonstrations properly, therefore, we ought to consider eight among them (1-2, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9) as four Antinomies, or couples establishing dialectic contradictions: and the third as a mediator satisfactory between the couples--announced as if it reconciled the contradictions of the first Antinomy, and capable of being adapted, in the same character with certain modifications, to the second, third, and fourth Antinomy. Whether it reconciles them successfully--in other words, whether the third Demonstration will itself hold good--is a different question. It will be found to involve the singular and paradoxical (Plato's own phrase) doctrine of the extra-temporal _Suddenly_--conceiving Time as a Discretum and not a Continuum. This doctrine is intended by Plato here as a means of rendering the fact of change logically conceivable and explicable. He first states briefly the difficulty (which we know to have been largely insisted on by Diodorus Kronus and other Megarics) of logically explaining the fact of change--and then enunciates this doctrine as the solution. We plainly see that it did not satisfy others--for the puzzle continued to be a puzzle long after--and that it did not even satisfy Plato, except at the time when he composed the Parmenides--since neither the doctrine itself (the extra-temporal break or transition) nor the very peculiar phrase in which it is embodied ([Greek: to\ e)xai/phnês, a)/topo/s tis phu/sis]) occur in any of his other dialogues. If the doctrine were really tenable, it would have been of use in dialectic, and as such, would have been called in to remove the theoretical difficulties raised among dialectical disputants, respecting time and motion. Yet Plato does not again advert to it, either in Sophistes or Timæus, in both of which there is special demand for it.[94] Aristotle, while he adopts a doctrine like it (yet without employing the peculiar phrase [Greek: to\ e)xai/phnês]) to explain qualitative change, does not admit the same either as to quantitative change, or as to local motion, or as to generation and destruction.[95] The doctrine served the purpose of the Platonic Parmenides, as ingenious, original, and provocative to intellectual effort: but it did not acquire any permanent footing in Grecian dialectics. [Footnote 94: Steinhart represents this idea of [Greek: to\ e)xai/phnês]--the extra-temporal break or zero of transition--as an important progress made by Plato, compared with the Theætêtus, because it breaks down the absoluten Gegensatz between Sein and Werden, Ruhe and Bewegung (Einleitung zum Parmen. p. 309). Surely, if Plato had considered it a progress, we should have seen the same idea repeated in various other dialogues--which is not the case.] [Footnote 95: Aristotel. Physic. p. 235, b. 32, with the Scholion of Simplikius, p. 410, b. 20, Brandis.