"Some pre-Socratic “Greek” thinking conceived of the world as a composite whole made up of indivisible parts (atoms) and so searched for a basic “stuff” at bottom. Conway suggests that the distinctions composite/indivisible, whole/part be collapsed without abandoning the pre-Socratic process of division. Divide a whole and you are left not with parts, but with wholes. In this sense, nothing is more “basic” than anything else. Plato and Parmenides began with the One not “at bottom,” but “at top.” The problem is not how to get a whole out of a bunch of parts, but how to account for the diversity of “wholes” without sacrificing unity. Perfect freedom would consist in perfect determination — perfect identification of wholes: hence, the idea of “conformity to God’s will” and the Quaker ideal of simplicity. Sequentially, there is a time and place where/ when “simpler” structures exist and more “complex” structures do not — but atemporally (and from the perspective of the whole) all simply exists. Reading back from that perspective (as Plato and Parmenides attempt to do), the“end” may be seen as informing the “beginning” and the “middle.” If Plato worked backward from the “end” and Democritus worked forward from the “beginning,” Conway worked outward from the middle — and this is the place Leibniz mapped in his comment to Burnett. Since the middle is the one place we can be, it is most assuredly a more secure place to start than the“end” or the “beginning,” where we cannot."