From this result, that nothing can arise from the like or from the unlike, Aristotle (De Xenophane, Zenone et Gorgia c. 4) draws this conclusion: “that either there is nothing excepting God, or all else is eternal.” We here see a dialectic which may be called metaphysical reasoning, in which the principle of identity is fundamental. “The nothing is like nothing and does not pass into Being or conversely; thus nothing can originate from like.” This, the oldest mode of argument, holds its place even to the present day, as, for example, in the so-called proof of the unity of God. This proceeding consists of making presuppositions such as the power of God, and from them drawing conclusions and denying the existence of predicates; that is the usual course in our mode of reasoning. In respect of determinations, it must be remarked that they, as being negative, are all kept apart from the positive and merely real being. We reach this abstraction by a more ordinary way, and do not require a dialectic such as that of the Eleatic school: we say God is unchangeable, change concerns finite things alone (which we represent as an empirical proposition); on the one hand we thus have finite things and change, and on the other, unchangeableness in this abstract absolute unity with itself. It is the same separation, only that we also allow the finite to be Being, which the Eleatics deny. Or else we too proceed from finite things to kinds and genera, leaving the negative out bit by bit; and the highest order of all is God, who, as the highest Being, is affirmative only, but devoid of any determination. Or we pass from what is finite to the infinite, for we say that the finite as limited must have its basis in the infinite. In all these different forms which are quite familiar to us, there is the same difficult question which exists in reference to the Eleatic thought. Whence comes determination and how is it to be grasped—how is it in the one, leaving the finite aside, and also how does the infinite pass out into the finite? The Eleatics in their reflections were distinguished from this our ordinary reflecting thought, in that they went speculatively to work (the speculative element being that change does not exist at all) and that they thus showed that, as Being was presupposed, change in itself is contradictory and inconceivable. For from the one, from Being, the determination of the negative, of the manifold, is withdrawn. Thus while we, in our conception, allow the actuality of the finite world, the Eleatics are more consistent, in that they proceeded to say that only the One exists and that the negative does not exist at all;—a consequence which, if it necessarily arouses in us surprise, still none the less remains a great abstraction. Sceptics saw in this the point of view of the uncertainty of all things, and Sextus several times[50] quotes verses such as these:—