indeed given, it is even attributed to two moving bodies, but, always by the same error, there is an assumption that their movement coincides with their path, and that we may divide it, like the path itself, in any way we please. Then, instead of recognizing that the tortoise has the pace of a tortoise and Achilles the pace of Achilles, so that after a certain number of these indivisible acts or bounds Achilles will have outrun the tortoise, the contention is that we may disarticulate as we will the movement of Achilles and, as we will also, the movement of the tortoise: thus reconstructing both in an arbitrary way, according to a law of our own which may be incompatible with the real conditions of mobility. The same fallacy appears, yet more evident, in the third argument (the Arrow) which consists in the conclusion that, because it is possible to distinguish points on the path of a moving body, we have the right to distinguish indivisible moments in the duration of its movement. But the most instructive of Zeno's arguments is perhaps the fourth (the Stadium) which has, we believe, been unjustly disdained, and of which the absurdity is more manifest only because the postulate masked in the three others is here frankly displayed.[1] Without entering on a dis-
- ↑ We may here briefly recall this argument. Let there be a moving body which is displaced with a certain velocity, and which passes simultaneously before two bodies, one at rest and the other moving towards it with the same velocity
