Produced by Sue Asscher

SOPHIST

By Plato

Translated by Benjamin Jowett

INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.

The dramatic power of the dialogues of Plato appears to diminish as
the metaphysical interest of them increases (compare Introd. to the
Philebus). There are no descriptions of time, place or persons, in the
Sophist and Statesman, but we are plunged at once into philosophical
discussions; the poetical charm has disappeared, and those who have no
taste for abstruse metaphysics will greatly prefer the earlier dialogues
to the later ones. Plato is conscious of the change, and in the
Statesman expressly accuses himself of a tediousness in the two
dialogues, which he ascribes to his desire of developing the dialectical
method. On the other hand, the kindred spirit of Hegel seemed to find in
the Sophist the crown and summit of the Platonic philosophy--here is the
place at which Plato most nearly approaches to the Hegelian identity of
Being and Not-being. Nor will the great importance of the two dialogues
be doubted by any one who forms a conception of the state of mind and
opinion which they are intended to meet. The sophisms of the day were
undermining philosophy; the denial of the existence of Not-being, and
of the connexion of ideas, was making truth and falsehood equally
impossible. It has been said that Plato would have written differently,
if he had been acquainted with the Organon of Aristotle. But could
the Organon of Aristotle ever have been written unless the Sophist
and Statesman had preceded? The swarm of fallacies which arose in the
infancy of mental science, and which was born and bred in the decay of
the pre-Socratic philosophies, was not dispelled by Aristotle, but
by Socrates and Plato. The summa genera of thought, the nature of
the proposition, of definition, of generalization, of synthesis and
analysis, of division and cross-division, are clearly described, and
the processes of induction and deduction are constantly employed in the
dialogues of Plato. The 'slippery' nature of comparison, the danger of
putting words in the place of things, the fallacy of arguing 'a dicto
secundum,' and in a circle, are frequently indicated by him. To all
these processes of truth and error, Aristotle, in the next generation,
gave distinctness; he brought them together in a separate science. But
he is not to be regarded as the original inventor of any of the great
logical forms, with the exception of the syllogism.

There is little worthy of remark in the characters of the Sophist. The
most noticeable point is the final retirement of Socrates from the field
of argument, and the substitution for him of an Eleatic stranger, who
is described as a pupil of Parmenides and Zeno, and is supposed to have
descended from a higher world in order to convict the Socratic circle of
error. As in the Timaeus, Plato seems to intimate by the withdrawal of
Socrates that he is passing beyond the limits of his teaching; and in
the Sophist and Statesman, as well as in the Parmenides, he probably
means to imply that he is making a closer approach to the schools of
Elea and Megara. He had much in common with them, but he must first
submit their ideas to criticism and revision. He had once thought as
he says, speaking by the mouth of the Eleatic, that he understood their
doctrine of Not-being; but now he does not even comprehend the nature
of Being. The friends of ideas (Soph.) are alluded to by him as distant
acquaintances, whom he criticizes ab extra; we do not recognize at
first sight that he is criticizing himself. The character of the Eleatic
stranger is colourless; he is to a certain extent the reflection of his
father and master, Parmenides, who is the protagonist in the dialogue
which is called by his name. Theaetetus himself is not distinguished
by the remarkable traits which are attributed to him in the preceding
dialogue. He is no longer under the spell of Socrates, or subject to the
operation of his midwifery, though the fiction of question and answer is
still maintained, and the necessity of taking Theaetetus along with him
is several times insisted upon by his partner in the discussion. There
is a reminiscence of the old Theaetetus in his remark that he will not
tire of the argument, and in his conviction, which the Eleatic thinks
likely to be permanent, that the course of events is governed by the
will of God. Throughout the two dialogues Socrates continues a silent
auditor, in the Statesman just reminding us of his presence, at the
commencement, by a characteristic jest about the statesman and the
philosopher, and by an allusion to his namesake, with whom on that
ground he claims relationship, as he had already claimed an affinity
with Theaetetus, grounded on the likeness of his ugly face. But in
neither dialogue, any more than in the Timaeus, does he offer any
criticism on the views which are propounded by another.

The style, though wanting in dramatic power,--in this respect resembling
the Philebus and the Laws,--is very clear and accurate, and has
several touches of humour and satire. The language is less fanciful and
imaginative than that of the earlier dialogues; and there is more of
bitterness, as in the Laws, though traces of a similar temper may also
be observed in the description of the 'great brute' in the Republic,
and in the contrast of the lawyer and philosopher in the Theaetetus.
The following are characteristic passages: 'The ancient philosophers,
of whom we may say, without offence, that they went on their way rather
regardless of whether we understood them or not;' the picture of the
materialists, or earth-born giants, 'who grasped oaks and rocks in their
hands,' and who must be improved before they can be reasoned with; and
the equally humourous delineation of the friends of ideas, who defend
themselves from a fastness in the invisible world; or the comparison of
the Sophist to a painter or maker (compare Republic), and the hunt after
him in the rich meadow-lands of youth and wealth; or, again, the
light and graceful touch with which the older philosophies are painted
('Ionian and Sicilian muses'), the comparison of them to mythological
tales, and the fear of the Eleatic that he will be counted a parricide
if he ventures to lay hands on his father Parmenides; or, once more,
the likening of the Eleatic stranger to a god from heaven.--All these
passages, notwithstanding the decline of the style, retain the impress
of the great master of language. But the equably diffused grace is gone;
instead of the endless variety of the early dialogues, traces of the
rhythmical monotonous cadence of the Laws begin to appear; and already
an approach is made to the technical language of Aristotle, in the
frequent use of the words 'essence,' 'power,' 'generation,' 'motion,'
'rest,' 'action,' 'passion,' and the like.

The Sophist, like the Phaedrus, has a double character, and unites two
enquirers, which are only in a somewhat forced manner connected with
each other. The first is the search after the Sophist, the second is the
enquiry into the nature of Not-being, which occupies the middle part of
the work. For 'Not-being' is the hole or division of the dialectical
net in which the Sophist has hidden himself. He is the imaginary
impersonation of false opinion. Yet he denies the possibility of false
opinion; for falsehood is that which is not, and therefore has no
existence. At length the difficulty is solved; the answer, in
the language of the Republic, appears 'tumbling out at our feet.'
Acknowledging that there is a communion of kinds with kinds, and not
merely one Being or Good having different names, or several isolated
ideas or classes incapable of communion, we discover 'Not-being' to be
the other of 'Being.' Transferring this to language and thought, we have
no difficulty in apprehending that a proposition may be false as well
as true. The Sophist, drawn out of the shelter which Cynic and Megarian
paradoxes have temporarily afforded him, is proved to be a dissembler
and juggler with words.

The chief points of interest in the dialogue are: (I) the character
attributed to the Sophist: (II) the dialectical method: (III) the nature
of the puzzle about 'Not-being:' (IV) the battle of the philosophers:
(V) the relation of the Sophist to other dialogues.

I. The Sophist in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the
charlatan, the foreigner, the prince of esprits-faux, the hireling who
is not a teacher, and who, from whatever point of view he is regarded,
is the opposite of the true teacher. He is the 'evil one,' the ideal
representative of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and
intellectual tendencies of his own age; the adversary of the almost
equally ideal Socrates. He seems to be always growing in the fancy
of Plato, now boastful, now eristic, now clothing himself in rags of
philosophy, now more akin to the rhetorician or lawyer, now haranguing,
now questioning, until the final appearance in the Politicus of his
departing shadow in the disguise of a statesman. We are not to suppose
that Plato intended by such a description to depict Protagoras or
Gorgias, or even Thrasymachus, who all turn out to be 'very good sort
of people when we know them,' and all of them part on good terms with
Socrates. But he is speaking of a being as imaginary as the wise man
of the Stoics, and whose character varies in different dialogues. Like
mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the
Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty
drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all
mankind is reflected.

A milder tone is adopted towards the Sophists in a well-known passage of
the Republic, where they are described as the followers rather than
the leaders of the rest of mankind. Plato ridicules the notion that
any individuals can corrupt youth to a degree worth speaking of in
comparison with the greater influence of public opinion. But there is
no real inconsistency between this and other descriptions of the Sophist
which occur in the Platonic writings. For Plato is not justifying the
Sophists in the passage just quoted, but only representing their power
to be contemptible; they are to be despised rather than feared, and are
no worse than the rest of mankind. But a teacher or statesman may be
justly condemned, who is on a level with mankind when he ought to be
above them. There is another point of view in which this passage should
also be considered. The great enemy of Plato is the world, not exactly
in the theological sense, yet in one not wholly different--the world as
the hater of truth and lover of appearance, occupied in the pursuit of
gain and pleasure rather than of knowledge, banded together against the
few good and wise men, and devoid of true education. This creature has
many heads: rhetoricians, lawyers, statesmen, poets, sophists. But the
Sophist is the Proteus who takes the likeness of all of them; all other
deceivers have a piece of him in them. And sometimes he is represented
as the corrupter of the world; and sometimes the world as the corrupter
of him and of itself.

Of late years the Sophists have found an enthusiastic defender in the
distinguished historian of Greece. He appears to maintain (1) that the
term 'Sophist' is not the name of a particular class, and would have
been applied indifferently to Socrates and Plato, as well as to Gorgias
and Protagoras; (2) that the bad sense was imprinted on the word by the
genius of Plato; (3) that the principal Sophists were not the corrupters
of youth (for the Athenian youth were no more corrupted in the age of
Demosthenes than in the age of Pericles), but honourable and estimable
persons, who supplied a training in literature which was generally
wanted at the time. We will briefly consider how far these statements
appear to be justified by facts: and, 1, about the meaning of the word
there arises an interesting question:--

Many words are used both in a general and a specific sense, and the
two senses are not always clearly distinguished. Sometimes the generic
meaning has been narrowed to the specific, while in other cases the
specific meaning has been enlarged or altered. Examples of the former
class are furnished by some ecclesiastical terms: apostles, prophets,
bishops, elders, catholics. Examples of the latter class may also be
found in a similar field: jesuits, puritans, methodists, and the like.
Sometimes the meaning is both narrowed and enlarged; and a good or bad
sense will subsist side by side with a neutral one. A curious effect
is produced on the meaning of a word when the very term which is
stigmatized by the world (e.g. Methodists) is adopted by the obnoxious
or derided class; this tends to define the meaning. Or, again, the
opposite result is produced, when the world refuses to allow some sect
or body of men the possession of an honourable name which they have
assumed, or applies it to them only in mockery or irony.

The term 'Sophist' is one of those words of which the meaning has been
both contracted and enlarged. Passages may be quoted from Herodotus
and the tragedians, in which the word is used in a neutral sense for a
contriver or deviser or inventor, without including any ethical idea of
goodness or badness. Poets as well as philosophers were called Sophists
in the fifth century before Christ. In Plato himself the term is applied
in the sense of a 'master in art,' without any bad meaning attaching to
it (Symp.; Meno). In the later Greek, again, 'sophist' and 'philosopher'
became almost indistinguishable. There was no reproach conveyed by the
word; the additional association, if any, was only that of rhetorician
or teacher. Philosophy had become eclecticism and imitation: in the
decline of Greek thought there was no original voice lifted up 'which
reached to a thousand years because of the god.' Hence the two words,
like the characters represented by them, tended to pass into one
another. Yet even here some differences appeared; for the term 'Sophist'
would hardly have been applied to the greater names, such as Plotinus,
and would have been more often used of a professor of philosophy in
general than of a maintainer of particular tenets.

But the real question is, not whether the word 'Sophist' has all these
senses, but whether there is not also a specific bad sense in which
the term is applied to certain contemporaries of Socrates. Would an
Athenian, as Mr. Grote supposes, in the fifth century before Christ,
have included Socrates and Plato, as well as Gorgias and Protagoras,
under the specific class of Sophists? To this question we must answer,
No: if ever the term is applied to Socrates and Plato, either the
application is made by an enemy out of mere spite, or the sense in which
it is used is neutral. Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Aristotle, all give
a bad import to the word; and the Sophists are regarded as a separate
class in all of them. And in later Greek literature, the distinction
is quite marked between the succession of philosophers from Thales to
Aristotle, and the Sophists of the age of Socrates, who appeared like
meteors for a short time in different parts of Greece. For the purposes
of comedy, Socrates may have been identified with the Sophists, and
he seems to complain of this in the Apology. But there is no reason to
suppose that Socrates, differing by so many outward marks, would really
have been confounded in the mind of Anytus, or Callicles, or of any
intelligent Athenian, with the splendid foreigners who from time to time
visited Athens, or appeared at the Olympic games. The man of genius, the
great original thinker, the disinterested seeker after truth, the master
of repartee whom no one ever defeated in an argument, was separated,
even in the mind of the vulgar Athenian, by an 'interval which no
geometry can express,' from the balancer of sentences, the interpreter
and reciter of the poets, the divider of the meanings of words, the
teacher of rhetoric, the professor of morals and manners.

2. The use of the term 'Sophist' in the dialogues of Plato also shows
that the bad sense was not affixed by his genius, but already current.
When Protagoras says, 'I confess that I am a Sophist,' he implies that
the art which he professes has already a bad name; and the words of the
young Hippocrates, when with a blush upon his face which is just seen
by the light of dawn he admits that he is going to be made 'a Sophist,'
would lose their point, unless the term had been discredited. There is
nothing surprising in the Sophists having an evil name; that, whether
deserved or not, was a natural consequence of their vocation. That they
were foreigners, that they made fortunes, that they taught novelties,
that they excited the minds of youth, are quite sufficient reasons to
account for the opprobrium which attached to them. The genius of Plato
could not have stamped the word anew, or have imparted the associations
which occur in contemporary writers, such as Xenophon and Isocrates.
Changes in the meaning of words can only be made with great difficulty,
and not unless they are supported by a strong current of popular
feeling. There is nothing improbable in supposing that Plato may
have extended and envenomed the meaning, or that he may have done the
Sophists the same kind of disservice with posterity which Pascal did to
the Jesuits. But the bad sense of the word was not and could not have
been invented by him, and is found in his earlier dialogues, e.g. the
Protagoras, as well as in the later.

3. There is no ground for disbelieving that the principal Sophists,
Gorgias, Protagoras, Prodicus, Hippias, were good and honourable men.
The notion that they were corrupters of the Athenian youth has no real
foundation, and partly arises out of the use of the term 'Sophist' in
modern times. The truth is, that we know little about them; and the
witness of Plato in their favour is probably not much more historical
than his witness against them. Of that national decline of genius,
unity, political force, which has been sometimes described as the
corruption of youth, the Sophists were one among many signs;--in these
respects Athens may have degenerated; but, as Mr. Grote remarks, there
is no reason to suspect any greater moral corruption in the age of
Demosthenes than in the age of Pericles. The Athenian youth were not
corrupted in this sense, and therefore the Sophists could not have
corrupted them. It is remarkable, and may be fairly set down to their
credit, that Plato nowhere attributes to them that peculiar Greek
sympathy with youth, which he ascribes to Parmenides, and which was
evidently common in the Socratic circle. Plato delights to exhibit
them in a ludicrous point of view, and to show them always rather at
a disadvantage in the company of Socrates. But he has no quarrel with
their characters, and does not deny that they are respectable men.

The Sophist, in the dialogue which is called after him, is exhibited in
many different lights, and appears and reappears in a variety of forms.
There is some want of the higher Platonic art in the Eleatic Stranger
eliciting his true character by a labourious process of enquiry, when he
had already admitted that he knew quite well the difference between
the Sophist and the Philosopher, and had often heard the question
discussed;--such an anticipation would hardly have occurred in the
earlier dialogues. But Plato could not altogether give up his Socratic
method, of which another trace may be thought to be discerned in his
adoption of a common instance before he proceeds to the greater matter
in hand. Yet the example is also chosen in order to damage the 'hooker
of men' as much as possible; each step in the pedigree of the angler
suggests some injurious reflection about the Sophist. They are both
hunters after a living prey, nearly related to tyrants and thieves, and
the Sophist is the cousin of the parasite and flatterer. The effect of
this is heightened by the accidental manner in which the discovery is
made, as the result of a scientific division. His descent in another
branch affords the opportunity of more 'unsavoury comparisons.' For he
is a retail trader, and his wares are either imported or home-made, like
those of other retail traders; his art is thus deprived of the character
of a liberal profession. But the most distinguishing characteristic of
him is, that he is a disputant, and higgles over an argument. A feature
of the Eristic here seems to blend with Plato's usual description of
the Sophists, who in the early dialogues, and in the Republic, are
frequently depicted as endeavouring to save themselves from disputing
with Socrates by making long orations. In this character he parts
company from the vain and impertinent talker in private life, who is a
loser of money, while he is a maker of it.

But there is another general division under which his art may be also
supposed to fall, and that is purification; and from purification
is descended education, and the new principle of education is to
interrogate men after the manner of Socrates, and make them teach
themselves. Here again we catch a glimpse rather of a Socratic or
Eristic than of a Sophist in the ordinary sense of the term. And Plato
does not on this ground reject the claim of the Sophist to be the true
philosopher. One more feature of the Eristic rather than of the Sophist
is the tendency of the troublesome animal to run away into the darkness
of Not-being. Upon the whole, we detect in him a sort of hybrid or
double nature, of which, except perhaps in the Euthydemus of Plato,
we find no other trace in Greek philosophy; he combines the teacher of
virtue with the Eristic; while in his omniscience, in his ignorance
of himself, in his arts of deception, and in his lawyer-like habit of
writing and speaking about all things, he is still the antithesis of
Socrates and of the true teacher.

II. The question has been asked, whether the method of 'abscissio
infinti,' by which the Sophist is taken, is a real and valuable logical
process. Modern science feels that this, like other processes of formal
logic, presents a very inadequate conception of the actual complex
procedure of the mind by which scientific truth is detected and
verified. Plato himself seems to be aware that mere division is an
unsafe and uncertain weapon, first, in the Statesman, when he says that
we should divide in the middle, for in that way we are more likely to
attain species; secondly, in the parallel precept of the Philebus,
that we should not pass from the most general notions to infinity, but
include all the intervening middle principles, until, as he also says
in the Statesman, we arrive at the infima species; thirdly, in the
Phaedrus, when he says that the dialectician will carve the limbs of
truth without mangling them; and once more in the Statesman, if we
cannot bisect species, we must carve them as well as we can. No better
image of nature or truth, as an organic whole, can be conceived than
this. So far is Plato from supposing that mere division and subdivision
of general notions will guide men into all truth.

Plato does not really mean to say that the Sophist or the Statesman
can be caught in this way. But these divisions and subdivisions were
favourite logical exercises of the age in which he lived; and while
indulging his dialectical fancy, and making a contribution to logical
method, he delights also to transfix the Eristic Sophist with weapons
borrowed from his own armoury. As we have already seen, the division
gives him the opportunity of making the most damaging reflections on
the Sophist and all his kith and kin, and to exhibit him in the most
discreditable light.

Nor need we seriously consider whether Plato was right in assuming that
an animal so various could not be confined within the limits of a
single definition. In the infancy of logic, men sought only to obtain
a definition of an unknown or uncertain term; the after reflection
scarcely occurred to them that the word might have several senses, which
shaded off into one another, and were not capable of being comprehended
in a single notion. There is no trace of this reflection in Plato.
But neither is there any reason to think, even if the reflection had
occurred to him, that he would have been deterred from carrying on the
war with weapons fair or unfair against the outlaw Sophist.

III. The puzzle about 'Not-being' appears to us to be one of the most
unreal difficulties of ancient philosophy. We cannot understand the
attitude of mind which could imagine that falsehood had no existence, if
reality was denied to Not-being: How could such a question arise at
all, much less become of serious importance? The answer to this, and to
nearly all other difficulties of early Greek philosophy, is to be sought
for in the history of ideas, and the answer is only unsatisfactory
because our knowledge is defective. In the passage from the world
of sense and imagination and common language to that of opinion and
reflection the human mind was exposed to many dangers, and often

     'Found no end in wandering mazes lost.'

On the other hand, the discovery of abstractions was the great source
of all mental improvement in after ages. It was the pushing aside of
the old, the revelation of the new. But each one of the company of
abstractions, if we may speak in the metaphorical language of Plato,
became in turn the tyrant of the mind, the dominant idea, which would
allow no other to have a share in the throne. This is especially true of
the Eleatic philosophy: while the absoluteness of Being was asserted
in every form of language, the sensible world and all the phenomena of
experience were comprehended under Not-being. Nor was any difficulty or
perplexity thus created, so long as the mind, lost in the contemplation
of Being, asked no more questions, and never thought of applying the
categories of Being or Not-being to mind or opinion or practical life.

But the negative as well as the positive idea had sunk deep into the
intellect of man. The effect of the paradoxes of Zeno extended far
beyond the Eleatic circle. And now an unforeseen consequence began to
arise. If the Many were not, if all things were names of the One, and
nothing could be predicated of any other thing, how could truth be
distinguished from falsehood? The Eleatic philosopher would have
replied that Being is alone true. But mankind had got beyond his barren
abstractions: they were beginning to analyze, to classify, to define,
to ask what is the nature of knowledge, opinion, sensation. Still less
could they be content with the description which Achilles gives in Homer
of the man whom his soul hates--

os chi eteron men keuthe eni phresin, allo de eipe.

For their difficulty was not a practical but a metaphysical one; and
their conception of falsehood was really impaired and weakened by a
metaphysical illusion.

The strength of the illusion seems to lie in the alternative: If we once
admit the existence of Being and Not-being, as two spheres which exclude
each other, no Being or reality can be ascribed to Not-being, and
therefore not to falsehood, which is the image or expression of
Not-being. Falsehood is wholly false; and to speak of true falsehood, as
Theaetetus does (Theaet.), is a contradiction in terms. The fallacy
to us is ridiculous and transparent,--no better than those which
Plato satirizes in the Euthydemus. It is a confusion of falsehood and
negation, from which Plato himself is not entirely free. Instead of
saying, 'This is not in accordance with facts,' 'This is proved by
experience to be false,' and from such examples forming a general notion
of falsehood, the mind of the Greek thinker was lost in the mazes of the
Eleatic philosophy. And the greater importance which Plato attributes
to this fallacy, compared with others, is due to the influence which
the Eleatic philosophy exerted over him. He sees clearly to a certain
extent; but he has not yet attained a complete mastery over the ideas of
his predecessors--they are still ends to him, and not mere instruments
of thought. They are too rough-hewn to be harmonized in a single
structure, and may be compared to rocks which project or overhang in
some ancient city's walls. There are many such imperfect syncretisms or
eclecticisms in the history of philosophy. A modern philosopher, though
emancipated from scholastic notions of essence or substance, might
still be seriously affected by the abstract idea of necessity; or though
accustomed, like Bacon, to criticize abstract notions, might not extend
his criticism to the syllogism.

The saying or thinking the thing that is not, would be the popular
definition of falsehood or error. If we were met by the Sophist's
objection, the reply would probably be an appeal to experience. Ten
thousands, as Homer would say (mala murioi), tell falsehoods and
fall into errors. And this is Plato's reply, both in the Cratylus
and Sophist. 'Theaetetus is flying,' is a sentence in form quite as
grammatical as 'Theaetetus is sitting'; the difference between the two
sentences is, that the one is true and the other false. But,
before making this appeal to common sense, Plato propounds for our
consideration a theory of the nature of the negative.

The theory is, that Not-being is relation. Not-being is the other of
Being, and has as many kinds as there are differences in Being.
This doctrine is the simple converse of the famous proposition of
Spinoza,--not 'Omnis determinatio est negatio,' but 'Omnis negatio est
determinatio';--not, All distinction is negation, but, All negation is
distinction. Not-being is the unfolding or determining of Being, and is
a necessary element in all other things that are. We should be careful
to observe, first, that Plato does not identify Being with Not-being; he
has no idea of progression by antagonism, or of the Hegelian vibration
of moments: he would not have said with Heracleitus, 'All things are
and are not, and become and become not.' Secondly, he has lost sight
altogether of the other sense of Not-being, as the negative of Being;
although he again and again recognizes the validity of the law of
contradiction. Thirdly, he seems to confuse falsehood with negation. Nor
is he quite consistent in regarding Not-being as one class of Being, and
yet as coextensive with Being in general. Before analyzing further the
topics thus suggested, we will endeavour to trace the manner in which
Plato arrived at his conception of Not-being.

In all the later dialogues of Plato, the idea of mind or intelligence
becomes more and more prominent. That idea which Anaxagoras employed
inconsistently in the construction of the world, Plato, in the Philebus,
the Sophist, and the Laws, extends to all things, attributing to
Providence a care, infinitesimal as well as infinite, of all creation.
The divine mind is the leading religious thought of the later works of
Plato. The human mind is a sort of reflection of this, having ideas
of Being, Sameness, and the like. At times they seem to be parted by a
great gulf (Parmenides); at other times they have a common nature, and
the light of a common intelligence.

But this ever-growing idea of mind is really irreconcilable with the
abstract Pantheism of the Eleatics. To the passionate language of
Parmenides, Plato replies in a strain equally passionate:--What! has
not Being mind? and is not Being capable of being known? and, if this
is admitted, then capable of being affected or acted upon?--in motion,
then, and yet not wholly incapable of rest. Already we have been
compelled to attribute opposite determinations to Being. And the
answer to the difficulty about Being may be equally the answer to the
difficulty about Not-being.

The answer is, that in these and all other determinations of any notion
we are attributing to it 'Not-being.' We went in search of Not-being and
seemed to lose Being, and now in the hunt after Being we recover both.
Not-being is a kind of Being, and in a sense co-extensive with Being.
And there are as many divisions of Not-being as of Being. To
every positive idea--'just,' 'beautiful,' and the like, there is a
corresponding negative idea--'not-just,' 'not-beautiful,' and the like.

A doubt may be raised whether this account of the negative is really
the true one. The common logicians would say that the 'not-just,'
'not-beautiful,' are not really classes at all, but are merged in one
great class of the infinite or negative. The conception of Plato, in
the days before logic, seems to be more correct than this. For the word
'not' does not altogether annihilate the positive meaning of the word
'just': at least, it does not prevent our looking for the 'not-just'
in or about the same class in which we might expect to find the 'just.'
'Not-just is not-honourable' is neither a false nor an unmeaning
proposition. The reason is that the negative proposition has really
passed into an undefined positive. To say that 'not-just' has no more
meaning than 'not-honourable'--that is to say, that the two cannot in
any degree be distinguished, is clearly repugnant to the common use of
language.

The ordinary logic is also jealous of the explanation of negation as
relation, because seeming to take away the principle of contradiction.
Plato, as far as we know, is the first philosopher who distinctly
enunciated this principle; and though we need not suppose him to have
been always consistent with himself, there is no real inconsistency
between his explanation of the negative and the principle of
contradiction. Neither the Platonic notion of the negative as the
principle of difference, nor the Hegelian identity of Being and
Not-being, at all touch the principle of contradiction. For what is
asserted about Being and Not-Being only relates to our most abstract
notions, and in no way interferes with the principle of contradiction
employed in the concrete. Because Not-being is identified with Other, or
Being with Not-being, this does not make the proposition 'Some have not
eaten' any the less a contradiction of 'All have eaten.'

The explanation of the negative given by Plato in the Sophist is a true
but partial one; for the word 'not,' besides the meaning of 'other,'
may also imply 'opposition.' And difference or opposition may be either
total or partial: the not-beautiful may be other than the beautiful, or
in no relation to the beautiful, or a specific class in various degrees
opposed to the beautiful. And the negative may be a negation of fact
or of thought (ou and me). Lastly, there are certain ideas, such as
'beginning,' 'becoming,' 'the finite,' 'the abstract,' in which
the negative cannot be separated from the positive, and 'Being' and
'Not-being' are inextricably blended.

Plato restricts the conception of Not-being to difference. Man is a
rational animal, and is not--as many other things as are not included
under this definition. He is and is not, and is because he is not.
Besides the positive class to which he belongs, there are endless
negative classes to which he may be referred. This is certainly
intelligible, but useless. To refer a subject to a negative class is
unmeaning, unless the 'not' is a mere modification of the positive, as
in the example of 'not honourable' and 'dishonourable'; or unless the
class is characterized by the absence rather than the presence of a
particular quality.

Nor is it easy to see how Not-being any more than Sameness or Otherness
is one of the classes of Being. They are aspects rather than classes of
Being. Not-being can only be included in Being, as the denial of some
particular class of Being. If we attempt to pursue such airy phantoms
at all, the Hegelian identity of Being and Not-being is a more apt and
intelligible expression of the same mental phenomenon. For Plato has
not distinguished between the Being which is prior to Not-being, and the
Being which is the negation of Not-being (compare Parm.).

But he is not thinking of this when he says that Being comprehends
Not-being. Again, we should probably go back for the true explanation
to the influence which the Eleatic philosophy exercised over him. Under
'Not-being' the Eleatic had included all the realities of the sensible
world. Led by this association and by the common use of language, which
has been already noticed, we cannot be much surprised that Plato should
have made classes of Not-being. It is observable that he does not
absolutely deny that there is an opposite of Being. He is inclined to
leave the question, merely remarking that the opposition, if admissible
at all, is not expressed by the term 'Not-being.'

On the whole, we must allow that the great service rendered by Plato
to metaphysics in the Sophist, is not his explanation of 'Not-being' as
difference. With this he certainly laid the ghost of 'Not-being'; and we
may attribute to him in a measure the credit of anticipating Spinoza
and Hegel. But his conception is not clear or consistent; he does not
recognize the different senses of the negative, and he confuses
the different classes of Not-being with the abstract notion. As the
Pre-Socratic philosopher failed to distinguish between the universal and
the true, while he placed the particulars of sense under the false and
apparent, so Plato appears to identify negation with falsehood, or is
unable to distinguish them. The greatest service rendered by him to
mental science is the recognition of the communion of classes, which,
although based by him on his account of 'Not-being,' is independent
of it. He clearly saw that the isolation of ideas or classes is the
annihilation of reasoning. Thus, after wandering in many diverging
paths, we return to common sense. And for this reason we may be inclined
to do less than justice to Plato,--because the truth which he attains
by a real effort of thought is to us a familiar and unconscious truism,
which no one would any longer think either of doubting or examining.

IV. The later dialogues of Plato contain many references to contemporary
philosophy. Both in the Theaetetus and in the Sophist he recognizes
that he is in the midst of a fray; a huge irregular battle everywhere
surrounds him (Theaet.). First, there are the two great philosophies
going back into cosmogony and poetry: the philosophy of Heracleitus,
supposed to have a poetical origin in Homer, and that of the Eleatics,
which in a similar spirit he conceives to be even older than Xenophanes
(compare Protag.). Still older were theories of two and three
principles, hot and cold, moist and dry, which were ever marrying and
being given in marriage: in speaking of these, he is probably referring
to Pherecydes and the early Ionians. In the philosophy of motion there
were different accounts of the relation of plurality and unity,
which were supposed to be joined and severed by love and hate,
some maintaining that this process was perpetually going on (e.g.
Heracleitus); others (e.g. Empedocles) that there was an alternation of
them. Of the Pythagoreans or of Anaxagoras he makes no distinct mention.
His chief opponents are, first, Eristics or Megarians; secondly, the
Materialists.

The picture which he gives of both these latter schools is indistinct;
and he appears reluctant to mention the names of their teachers. Nor can
we easily determine how much is to be assigned to the Cynics, how much
to the Megarians, or whether the 'repellent Materialists' (Theaet.)
are Cynics or Atomists, or represent some unknown phase of opinion at
Athens. To the Cynics and Antisthenes is commonly attributed, on the
authority of Aristotle, the denial of predication, while the Megarians
are said to have been Nominalists, asserting the One Good under many
names to be the true Being of Zeno and the Eleatics, and, like Zeno,
employing their negative dialectic in the refutation of opponents. But
the later Megarians also denied predication; and this tenet, which is
attributed to all of them by Simplicius, is certainly in accordance with
their over-refining philosophy. The 'tyros young and old,' of whom
Plato speaks, probably include both. At any rate, we shall be safer in
accepting the general description of them which he has given, and in not
attempting to draw a precise line between them.

Of these Eristics, whether Cynics or Megarians, several characteristics
are found in Plato:--

1. They pursue verbal oppositions; 2. they make reasoning impossible by
their over-accuracy in the use of language; 3. they deny predication;
4. they go from unity to plurality, without passing through the
intermediate stages; 5. they refuse to attribute motion or power to
Being; 6. they are the enemies of sense;--whether they are the 'friends
of ideas,' who carry on the polemic against sense, is uncertain;
probably under this remarkable expression Plato designates those who
more nearly approached himself, and may be criticizing an earlier form
of his own doctrines. We may observe (1) that he professes only to give
us a few opinions out of many which were at that time current in
Greece; (2) that he nowhere alludes to the ethical teaching of the
Cynics--unless the argument in the Protagoras, that the virtues are one
and not many, may be supposed to contain a reference to their views, as
well as to those of Socrates; and unless they are the school alluded to
in the Philebus, which is described as 'being very skilful in physics,
and as maintaining pleasure to be the absence of pain.' That Antisthenes
wrote a book called 'Physicus,' is hardly a sufficient reason for
describing them as skilful in physics, which appear to have been very
alien to the tendency of the Cynics.

The Idealism of the fourth century before Christ in Greece, as in
other ages and countries, seems to have provoked a reaction towards
Materialism. The maintainers of this doctrine are described in the
Theaetetus as obstinate persons who will believe in nothing which they
cannot hold in their hands, and in the Sophist as incapable of argument.
They are probably the same who are said in the Tenth Book of the Laws
to attribute the course of events to nature, art, and chance. Who they
were, we have no means of determining except from Plato's description of
them. His silence respecting the Atomists might lead us to suppose that
here we have a trace of them. But the Atomists were not Materialists in
the grosser sense of the term, nor were they incapable of reasoning; and
Plato would hardly have described a great genius like Democritus in the
disdainful terms which he uses of the Materialists. Upon the whole, we
must infer that the persons here spoken of are unknown to us, like the
many other writers and talkers at Athens and elsewhere, of whose endless
activity of mind Aristotle in his Metaphysics has preserved an anonymous
memorial.

V. The Sophist is the sequel of the Theaetetus, and is connected with
the Parmenides by a direct allusion (compare Introductions to Theaetetus
and Parmenides). In the Theaetetus we sought to discover the nature
of knowledge and false opinion. But the nature of false opinion seemed
impenetrable; for we were unable to understand how there could be any
reality in Not-being. In the Sophist the question is taken up again; the
nature of Not-being is detected, and there is no longer any metaphysical
impediment in the way of admitting the possibility of falsehood. To
the Parmenides, the Sophist stands in a less defined and more remote
relation. There human thought is in process of disorganization; no
absurdity or inconsistency is too great to be elicited from the
analysis of the simple ideas of Unity or Being. In the Sophist the same
contradictions are pursued to a certain extent, but only with a view
to their resolution. The aim of the dialogue is to show how the few
elemental conceptions of the human mind admit of a natural connexion in
thought and speech, which Megarian or other sophistry vainly attempts to
deny.

...

True to the appointment of the previous day, Theodorus and Theaetetus
meet Socrates at the same spot, bringing with them an Eleatic Stranger,
whom Theodorus introduces as a true philosopher. Socrates, half in jest,
half in earnest, declares that he must be a god in disguise, who, as
Homer would say, has come to earth that he may visit the good and evil
among men, and detect the foolishness of Athenian wisdom. At any rate he
is a divine person, one of a class who are hardly recognized on earth;
who appear in divers forms--now as statesmen, now as sophists, and are
often deemed madmen. 'Philosopher, statesman, sophist,' says Socrates,
repeating the words--'I should like to ask our Eleatic friend what his
countrymen think of them; do they regard them as one, or three?'

The Stranger has been already asked the same question by Theodorus and
Theaetetus; and he at once replies that they are thought to be three;
but to explain the difference fully would take time. He is pressed
to give this fuller explanation, either in the form of a speech or
of question and answer. He prefers the latter, and chooses as his
respondent Theaetetus, whom he already knows, and who is recommended to
him by Socrates.

We are agreed, he says, about the name Sophist, but we may not be
equally agreed about his nature. Great subjects should be approached
through familiar examples, and, considering that he is a creature not
easily caught, I think that, before approaching him, we should try
our hand upon some more obvious animal, who may be made the subject of
logical experiment; shall we say an angler? 'Very good.'

In the first place, the angler is an artist; and there are two kinds
of art,--productive art, which includes husbandry, manufactures,
imitations; and acquisitive art, which includes learning, trading,
fighting, hunting. The angler's is an acquisitive art, and acquisition
may be effected either by exchange or by conquest; in the latter case,
either by force or craft. Conquest by craft is called hunting, and of
hunting there is one kind which pursues inanimate, and another which
pursues animate objects; and animate objects may be either land animals
or water animals, and water animals either fly over the water or live
in the water. The hunting of the last is called fishing; and of fishing,
one kind uses enclosures, catching the fish in nets and baskets, and
another kind strikes them either with spears by night or with barbed
spears or barbed hooks by day; the barbed spears are impelled from
above, the barbed hooks are jerked into the head and lips of the fish,
which are then drawn from below upwards. Thus, by a series of divisions,
we have arrived at the definition of the angler's art.

And now by the help of this example we may proceed to bring to light
the nature of the Sophist. Like the angler, he is an artist, and the
resemblance does not end here. For they are both hunters, and hunters
of animals; the one of water, and the other of land animals. But at this
point they diverge, the one going to the sea and the rivers, and the
other to the rivers of wealth and rich meadow-lands, in which generous
youth abide. On land you may hunt tame animals, or you may hunt wild
animals. And man is a tame animal, and he may be hunted either by force
or persuasion;--either by the pirate, man-stealer, soldier, or by the
lawyer, orator, talker. The latter use persuasion, and persuasion is
either private or public. Of the private practitioners of the art, some
bring gifts to those whom they hunt: these are lovers. And others take
hire; and some of these flatter, and in return are fed; others profess
to teach virtue and receive a round sum. And who are these last? Tell me
who? Have we not unearthed the Sophist?

But he is a many-sided creature, and may still be traced in another line
of descent. The acquisitive art had a branch of exchange as well as of
hunting, and exchange is either giving or selling; and the seller is
either a manufacturer or a merchant; and the merchant either retails or
exports; and the exporter may export either food for the body or food
for the mind. And of this trading in food for the mind, one kind may be
termed the art of display, and another the art of selling learning; and
learning may be a learning of the arts or of virtue. The seller of the
arts may be called an art-seller; the seller of virtue, a Sophist.

Again, there is a third line, in which a Sophist may be traced. For
is he less a Sophist when, instead of exporting his wares to another
country, he stays at home, and retails goods, which he not only buys of
others, but manufactures himself?

Or he may be descended from the acquisitive art in the combative line,
through the pugnacious, the controversial, the disputatious arts; and he
will be found at last in the eristic section of the latter, and in that
division of it which disputes in private for gain about the general
principles of right and wrong.

And still there is a track of him which has not yet been followed out by
us. Do not our household servants talk of sifting, straining, winnowing?
And they also speak of carding, spinning, and the like. All these are
processes of division; and of division there are two kinds,--one in
which like is divided from like, and another in which the good is
separated from the bad. The latter of the two is termed purification;
and again, of purification, there are two sorts,--of animate bodies
(which may be internal or external), and of inanimate. Medicine and
gymnastic are the internal purifications of the animate, and bathing the
external; and of the inanimate, fulling and cleaning and other humble
processes, some of which have ludicrous names. Not that dialectic is a
respecter of names or persons, or a despiser of humble occupations; nor
does she think much of the greater or less benefits conferred by them.
For her aim is knowledge; she wants to know how the arts are related to
one another, and would quite as soon learn the nature of hunting from
the vermin-destroyer as from the general. And she only desires to have
a general name, which shall distinguish purifications of the soul from
purifications of the body.

Now purification is the taking away of evil; and there are two kinds
of evil in the soul,--the one answering to disease in the body, and the
other to deformity. Disease is the discord or war of opposite principles
in the soul; and deformity is the want of symmetry, or failure in the
attainment of a mark or measure. The latter arises from ignorance, and
no one is voluntarily ignorant; ignorance is only the aberration of the
soul moving towards knowledge. And as medicine cures the diseases and
gymnastic the deformity of the body, so correction cures the injustice,
and education (which differs among the Hellenes from mere instruction in
the arts) cures the ignorance of the soul. Again, ignorance is twofold,
simple ignorance, and ignorance having the conceit of knowledge. And
education is also twofold: there is the old-fashioned moral training of
our forefathers, which was very troublesome and not very successful; and
another, of a more subtle nature, which proceeds upon a notion that
all ignorance is involuntary. The latter convicts a man out of his own
mouth, by pointing out to him his inconsistencies and contradictions;
and the consequence is that he quarrels with himself, instead of
quarrelling with his neighbours, and is cured of prejudices and
obstructions by a mode of treatment which is equally entertaining and
effectual. The physician of the soul is aware that his patient will
receive no nourishment unless he has been cleaned out; and the soul of
the Great King himself, if he has not undergone this purification, is
unclean and impure.

And who are the ministers of the purification? Sophists I may not call
them. Yet they bear about the same likeness to Sophists as the dog,
who is the gentlest of animals, does to the wolf, who is the fiercest.
Comparisons are slippery things; but for the present let us assume the
resemblance of the two, which may probably be disallowed hereafter.
And so, from division comes purification; and from this, mental
purification; and from mental purification, instruction; and from
instruction, education; and from education, the nobly-descended art
of Sophistry, which is engaged in the detection of conceit. I do not
however think that we have yet found the Sophist, or that his will
ultimately prove to be the desired art of education; but neither do I
think that he can long escape me, for every way is blocked. Before we
make the final assault, let us take breath, and reckon up the many forms
which he has assumed: (1) he was the paid hunter of wealth and birth;
(2) he was the trader in the goods of the soul; (3) he was the retailer
of them; (4) he was the manufacturer of his own learned wares; (5)
he was the disputant; and (6) he was the purger away of
prejudices--although this latter point is admitted to be doubtful.

Now, there must surely be something wrong in the professor of any art
having so many names and kinds of knowledge. Does not the very number of
them imply that the nature of his art is not understood? And that we
may not be involved in the misunderstanding, let us observe which of
his characteristics is the most prominent. Above all things he is a
disputant. He will dispute and teach others to dispute about things
visible and invisible--about man, about the gods, about politics, about
law, about wrestling, about all things. But can he know all things? 'He
cannot.' How then can he dispute satisfactorily with any one who knows?
'Impossible.' Then what is the trick of his art, and why does he receive
money from his admirers? 'Because he is believed by them to know all
things.' You mean to say that he seems to have a knowledge of them?
'Yes.'

Suppose a person were to say, not that he would dispute about all
things, but that he would make all things, you and me, and all other
creatures, the earth and the heavens and the gods, and would sell them
all for a few pence--this would be a great jest; but not greater than if
he said that he knew all things, and could teach them in a short time,
and at a small cost. For all imitation is a jest, and the most graceful
form of jest. Now the painter is a man who professes to make all things,
and children, who see his pictures at a distance, sometimes take them
for realities: and the Sophist pretends to know all things, and he, too,
can deceive young men, who are still at a distance from the truth, not
through their eyes, but through their ears, by the mummery of words,
and induce them to believe him. But as they grow older, and come into
contact with realities, they learn by experience the futility of his
pretensions. The Sophist, then, has not real knowledge; he is only an
imitator, or image-maker.

And now, having got him in a corner of the dialectical net, let us
divide and subdivide until we catch him. Of image-making there are two
kinds,--the art of making likenesses, and the art of making appearances.
The latter may be illustrated by sculpture and painting, which often use
illusions, and alter the proportions of figures, in order to adapt
their works to the eye. And the Sophist also uses illusions, and
his imitations are apparent and not real. But how can anything be an
appearance only? Here arises a difficulty which has always beset the
subject of appearances. For the argument is asserting the existence
of not-being. And this is what the great Parmenides was all his life
denying in prose and also in verse. 'You will never find,' he says,
'that not-being is.' And the words prove themselves! Not-being cannot be
attributed to any being; for how can any being be wholly abstracted from
being? Again, in every predication there is an attribution of singular
or plural. But number is the most real of all things, and cannot be
attributed to not-being. Therefore not-being cannot be predicated or
expressed; for how can we say 'is,' 'are not,' without number?

And now arises the greatest difficulty of all. If not-being is
inconceivable, how can not-being be refuted? And am I not contradicting
myself at this moment, in speaking either in the singular or the plural
of that to which I deny both plurality and unity? You, Theaetetus, have
the might of youth, and I conjure you to exert yourself, and, if you
can, to find an expression for not-being which does not imply being and
number. 'But I cannot.' Then the Sophist must be left in his hole. We
may call him an image-maker if we please, but he will only say, 'And
pray, what is an image?' And we shall reply, 'A reflection in the water,
or in a mirror'; and he will say, 'Let us shut our eyes and open our
minds; what is the common notion of all images?' 'I should answer, Such
another, made in the likeness of the true.' Real or not real? 'Not real;
at least, not in a true sense.' And the real 'is,' and the not-real 'is
not'? 'Yes.' Then a likeness is really unreal, and essentially not.
Here is a pretty complication of being and not-being, in which the
many-headed Sophist has entangled us. He will at once point out that
he is compelling us to contradict ourselves, by affirming being of
not-being. I think that we must cease to look for him in the class of
imitators.

But ought we to give him up? 'I should say, certainly not.' Then I fear
that I must lay hands on my father Parmenides; but do not call me a
parricide; for there is no way out of the difficulty except to show
that in some sense not-being is; and if this is not admitted, no one can
speak of falsehood, or false opinion, or imitation, without falling into
a contradiction. You observe how unwilling I am to undertake the task;
for I know that I am exposing myself to the charge of inconsistency in
asserting the being of not-being. But if I am to make the attempt, I
think that I had better begin at the beginning.

Lightly in the days of our youth, Parmenides and others told us tales
about the origin of the universe: one spoke of three principles warring
and at peace again, marrying and begetting children; another of
two principles, hot and cold, dry and moist, which also formed
relationships. There were the Eleatics in our part of the world, saying
that all things are one; whose doctrine begins with Xenophanes, and is
even older. Ionian, and, more recently, Sicilian muses speak of a one
and many which are held together by enmity and friendship, ever parting,
ever meeting. Some of them do not insist on the perpetual strife, but
adopt a gentler strain, and speak of alternation only. Whether they are
right or not, who can say? But one thing we can say--that they went on
their way without much caring whether we understood them or not. For
tell me, Theaetetus, do you understand what they mean by their assertion
of unity, or by their combinations and separations of two or more
principles? I used to think, when I was young, that I knew all about
not-being, and now I am in great difficulties even about being.

Let us proceed first to the examination of being. Turning to the dualist
philosophers, we say to them: Is being a third element besides hot and
cold? or do you identify one or both of the two elements with being?
At any rate, you can hardly avoid resolving them into one. Let us next
interrogate the patrons of the one. To them we say: Are being and one
two different names for the same thing? But how can there be two names
when there is nothing but one? Or you may identify them; but then the
name will be either the name of nothing or of itself, i.e. of a name.
Again, the notion of being is conceived of as a whole--in the words
of Parmenides, 'like every way unto a rounded sphere.' And a whole has
parts; but that which has parts is not one, for unity has no parts. Is
being, then, one, because the parts of being are one, or shall we say
that being is not a whole? In the former case, one is made up of parts;
and in the latter there is still plurality, viz. being, and a whole
which is apart from being. And being, if not all things, lacks something
of the nature of being, and becomes not-being. Nor can being ever have
come into existence, for nothing comes into existence except as a whole;
nor can being have number, for that which has number is a whole or sum
of number. These are a few of the difficulties which are accumulating
one upon another in the consideration of being.

We may proceed now to the less exact sort of philosophers. Some of
them drag down everything to earth, and carry on a war like that of the
giants, grasping rocks and oaks in their hands. Their adversaries defend
themselves warily from an invisible world, and reduce the substances
of their opponents to the minutest fractions, until they are lost in
generation and flux. The latter sort are civil people enough; but the
materialists are rude and ignorant of dialectics; they must be taught
how to argue before they can answer. Yet, for the sake of the argument,
we may assume them to be better than they are, and able to give an
account of themselves. They admit the existence of a mortal living
creature, which is a body containing a soul, and to this they would not
refuse to attribute qualities--wisdom, folly, justice and injustice. The
soul, as they say, has a kind of body, but they do not like to assert
of these qualities of the soul, either that they are corporeal, or that
they have no existence; at this point they begin to make distinctions.
'Sons of earth,' we say to them, 'if both visible and invisible
qualities exist, what is the common nature which is attributed to them
by the term "being" or "existence"?' And, as they are incapable of
answering this question, we may as well reply for them, that being is
the power of doing or suffering. Then we turn to the friends of ideas:
to them we say, 'You distinguish becoming from being?' 'Yes,' they will
reply. 'And in becoming you participate through the bodily senses, and
in being, by thought and the mind?' 'Yes.' And you mean by the word
'participation' a power of doing or suffering? To this they answer--I
am acquainted with them, Theaetetus, and know their ways better than you
do--that being can neither do nor suffer, though becoming may. And we
rejoin: Does not the soul know? And is not 'being' known? And are not
'knowing' and 'being known' active and passive? That which is known is
affected by knowledge, and therefore is in motion. And, indeed, how
can we imagine that perfect being is a mere everlasting form, devoid of
motion and soul? for there can be no thought without soul, nor can soul
be devoid of motion. But neither can thought or mind be devoid of some
principle of rest or stability. And as children say entreatingly,
'Give us both,' so the philosopher must include both the moveable and
immoveable in his idea of being. And yet, alas! he and we are in the
same difficulty with which we reproached the dualists; for motion and
rest are contradictions--how then can they both exist? Does he who
affirms this mean to say that motion is rest, or rest motion? 'No; he
means to assert the existence of some third thing, different from them
both, which neither rests nor moves.' But how can there be anything
which neither rests nor moves? Here is a second difficulty about being,
quite as great as that about not-being. And we may hope that any light
which is thrown upon the one may extend to the other.

Leaving them for the present, let us enquire what we mean by giving many
names to the same thing, e.g. white, good, tall, to man; out of which
tyros old and young derive such a feast of amusement. Their meagre minds
refuse to predicate anything of anything; they say that good is good,
and man is man; and that to affirm one of the other would be making
the many one and the one many. Let us place them in a class with our
previous opponents, and interrogate both of them at once. Shall we
assume (1) that being and rest and motion, and all other things,
are incommunicable with one another? or (2) that they all have
indiscriminate communion? or (3) that there is communion of some and not
of others? And we will consider the first hypothesis first of all.

(1) If we suppose the universal separation of kinds, all theories alike
are swept away; the patrons of a single principle of rest or of motion,
or of a plurality of immutable ideas--all alike have the ground cut from
under them; and all creators of the universe by theories of composition
and division, whether out of or into a finite or infinite number of
elemental forms, in alternation or continuance, share the same fate.
Most ridiculous is the discomfiture which attends the opponents of
predication, who, like the ventriloquist Eurycles, have the voice that
answers them in their own breast. For they cannot help using the words
'is,' 'apart,' 'from others,' and the like; and their adversaries are
thus saved the trouble of refuting them. But (2) if all things have
communion with all things, motion will rest, and rest will move; here is
a reductio ad absurdum. Two out of the three hypotheses are thus seen to
be false. The third (3) remains, which affirms that only certain things
communicate with certain other things. In the alphabet and the scale
there are some letters and notes which combine with others, and some
which do not; and the laws according to which they combine or are
separated are known to the grammarian and musician. And there is a
science which teaches not only what notes and letters, but what classes
admit of combination with one another, and what not. This is a noble
science, on which we have stumbled unawares; in seeking after the
Sophist we have found the philosopher. He is the master who discerns
one whole or form pervading a scattered multitude, and many such wholes
combined under a higher one, and many entirely apart--he is the true
dialectician. Like the Sophist, he is hard to recognize, though for the
opposite reasons; the Sophist runs away into the obscurity of not-being,
the philosopher is dark from excess of light. And now, leaving him, we
will return to our pursuit of the Sophist.

Agreeing in the truth of the third hypothesis, that some things have
communion and others not, and that some may have communion with all, let
us examine the most important kinds which are capable of admixture; and
in this way we may perhaps find out a sense in which not-being may be
affirmed to have being. Now the highest kinds are being, rest, motion;
and of these, rest and motion exclude each other, but both of them are
included in being; and again, they are the same with themselves and
the other of each other. What is the meaning of these words, 'same' and
'other'? Are there two more kinds to be added to the three others? For
sameness cannot be either rest or motion, because predicated both of
rest and motion; nor yet being; because if being were attributed to both
of them we should attribute sameness to both of them. Nor can other be
identified with being; for then other, which is relative, would have the
absoluteness of being. Therefore we must assume a fifth principle, which
is universal, and runs through all things, for each thing is other than
all other things. Thus there are five principles: (1) being, (2) motion,
which is not (3) rest, and because participating both in the same and
other, is and is not (4) the same with itself, and is and is not (5)
other than the other. And motion is not being, but partakes of being,
and therefore is and is not in the most absolute sense. Thus we have
discovered that not-being is the principle of the other which runs
through all things, being not excepted. And 'being' is one thing, and
'not-being' includes and is all other things. And not-being is not the
opposite of being, but only the other. Knowledge has many branches,
and the other or difference has as many, each of which is described by
prefixing the word 'not' to some kind of knowledge. The not-beautiful is
as real as the beautiful, the not-just as the just. And the essence of
the not-beautiful is to be separated from and opposed to a certain kind
of existence which is termed beautiful. And this opposition and negation
is the not-being of which we are in search, and is one kind of being.
Thus, in spite of Parmenides, we have not only discovered the existence,
but also the nature of not-being--that nature we have found to be
relation. In the communion of different kinds, being and other mutually
interpenetrate; other is, but is other than being, and other than each
and all of the remaining kinds, and therefore in an infinity of ways 'is
not.' And the argument has shown that the pursuit of contradictions is
childish and useless, and the very opposite of that higher spirit which
criticizes the words of another according to the natural meaning
of them. Nothing can be more unphilosophical than the denial of all
communion of kinds. And we are fortunate in having established such a
communion for another reason, because in continuing the hunt after the
Sophist we have to examine the nature of discourse, and there could be
no discourse if there were no communion. For the Sophist, although he
can no longer deny the existence of not-being, may still affirm that
not-being cannot enter into discourse, and as he was arguing before that
there could be no such thing as falsehood, because there was no such
thing as not-being, he may continue to argue that there is no such thing
as the art of image-making and phantastic, because not-being has no
place in language. Hence arises the necessity of examining speech,
opinion, and imagination.

And first concerning speech; let us ask the same question about words
which we have already answered about the kinds of being and the letters
of the alphabet: To what extent do they admit of combination? Some words
have a meaning when combined, and others have no meaning. One class of
words describes action, another class agents: 'walks,' 'runs,' 'sleeps'
are examples of the first; 'stag,' 'horse,' 'lion' of the second. But
no combination of words can be formed without a verb and a noun, e.g. 'A
man learns'; the simplest sentence is composed of two words, and one
of these must be a subject. For example, in the sentence, 'Theaetetus
sits,' which is not very long, 'Theaetetus' is the subject, and in the
sentence 'Theaetetus flies,' 'Theaetetus' is again the subject. But the
two sentences differ in quality, for the first says of you that which
is true, and the second says of you that which is not true, or, in other
words, attributes to you things which are not as though they were. Here
is false discourse in the shortest form. And thus not only speech,
but thought and opinion and imagination are proved to be both true and
false. For thought is only the process of silent speech, and opinion is
only the silent assent or denial which follows this, and imagination is
only the expression of this in some form of sense. All of them are akin
to speech, and therefore, like speech, admit of true and false. And
we have discovered false opinion, which is an encouraging sign of our
probable success in the rest of the enquiry.

Then now let us return to our old division of likeness-making and
phantastic. When we were going to place the Sophist in one of them,
a doubt arose whether there could be such a thing as an appearance,
because there was no such thing as falsehood. At length falsehood
has been discovered by us to exist, and we have acknowledged that the
Sophist is to be found in the class of imitators. All art was divided
originally by us into two branches--productive and acquisitive. And
now we may divide both on a different principle into the creations or
imitations which are of human, and those which are of divine, origin.
For we must admit that the world and ourselves and the animals did not
come into existence by chance, or the spontaneous working of nature, but
by divine reason and knowledge. And there are not only divine creations
but divine imitations, such as apparitions and shadows and reflections,
which are equally the work of a divine mind. And there are human
creations and human imitations too,--there is the actual house and the
drawing of it. Nor must we forget that image-making may be an imitation
of realities or an imitation of appearances, which last has been
called by us phantastic. And this phantastic may be again divided into
imitation by the help of instruments and impersonations. And the
latter may be either dissembling or unconscious, either with or without
knowledge. A man cannot imitate you, Theaetetus, without knowing you,
but he can imitate the form of justice or virtue if he have a sentiment
or opinion about them. Not being well provided with names, the former
I will venture to call the imitation of science, and the latter the
imitation of opinion.

The latter is our present concern, for the Sophist has no claims to
science or knowledge. Now the imitator, who has only opinion, may be
either the simple imitator, who thinks that he knows, or the dissembler,
who is conscious that he does not know, but disguises his ignorance. And
the last may be either a maker of long speeches, or of shorter speeches
which compel the person conversing to contradict himself. The maker of
longer speeches is the popular orator; the maker of the shorter is
the Sophist, whose art may be traced as being the

     / contradictious
     / dissembling
     / without knowledge
     / human and not divine
     / juggling with words
     / phantastic or unreal
     / art of image-making.

...

In commenting on the dialogue in which Plato most nearly approaches the
great modern master of metaphysics there are several points which
it will be useful to consider, such as the unity of opposites, the
conception of the ideas as causes, and the relation of the Platonic and
Hegelian dialectic.

The unity of opposites was the crux of ancient thinkers in the age of
Plato: How could one thing be or become another? That substances have
attributes was implied in common language; that heat and cold, day and
night, pass into one another was a matter of experience 'on a level with
the cobbler's understanding' (Theat.). But how could philosophy explain
the connexion of ideas, how justify the passing of them into one
another? The abstractions of one, other, being, not-being, rest, motion,
individual, universal, which successive generations of philosophers had
recently discovered, seemed to be beyond the reach of human thought,
like stars shining in a distant heaven. They were the symbols of
different schools of philosophy: but in what relation did they stand to
one another and to the world of sense? It was hardly conceivable
that one could be other, or the same different. Yet without some
reconciliation of these elementary ideas thought was impossible. There
was no distinction between truth and falsehood, between the Sophist
and the philosopher. Everything could be predicated of everything,
or nothing of anything. To these difficulties Plato finds what to us
appears to be the answer of common sense--that Not-being is the relative
or other of Being, the defining and distinguishing principle, and that
some ideas combine with others, but not all with all. It is remarkable
however that he offers this obvious reply only as the result of a long
and tedious enquiry; by a great effort he is able to look down as 'from
a height' on the 'friends of the ideas' as well as on the pre-Socratic
philosophies. Yet he is merely asserting principles which no one who
could be made to understand them would deny.

The Platonic unity of differences or opposites is the beginning of the
modern view that all knowledge is of relations; it also anticipates the
doctrine of Spinoza that all determination is negation. Plato takes or
gives so much of either of these theories as was necessary or possible
in the age in which he lived. In the Sophist, as in the Cratylus, he is
opposed to the Heracleitean flux and equally to the Megarian and
Cynic denial of predication, because he regards both of them as making
knowledge impossible. He does not assert that everything is and is not,
or that the same thing can be affected in the same and in opposite ways
at the same time and in respect of the same part of itself. The law
of contradiction is as clearly laid down by him in the Republic, as by
Aristotle in his Organon. Yet he is aware that in the negative there is
also a positive element, and that oppositions may be only differences.
And in the Parmenides he deduces the many from the one and Not-being
from Being, and yet shows that the many are included in the one, and
that Not-being returns to Being.

In several of the later dialogues Plato is occupied with the connexion
of the sciences, which in the Philebus he divides into two classes of
pure and applied, adding to them there as elsewhere (Phaedr., Crat.,
Republic, States.) a superintending science of dialectic. This is the
origin of Aristotle's Architectonic, which seems, however, to have
passed into an imaginary science of essence, and no longer to retain
any relation to other branches of knowledge. Of such a science, whether
described as 'philosophia prima,' the science of ousia, logic or
metaphysics, philosophers have often dreamed. But even now the time has
not arrived when the anticipation of Plato can be realized. Though many
a thinker has framed a 'hierarchy of the sciences,' no one has as yet
found the higher science which arrays them in harmonious order,
giving to the organic and inorganic, to the physical and moral, their
respective limits, and showing how they all work together in the world
and in man.

Plato arranges in order the stages of knowledge and of existence. They
are the steps or grades by which he rises from sense and the shadows of
sense to the idea of beauty and good. Mind is in motion as well as
at rest (Soph.); and may be described as a dialectical progress which
passes from one limit or determination of thought to another and back
again to the first. This is the account of dialectic given by Plato in
the Sixth Book of the Republic, which regarded under another aspect
is the mysticism of the Symposium. He does not deny the existence of
objects of sense, but according to him they only receive their true
meaning when they are incorporated in a principle which is above them
(Republic). In modern language they might be said to come first in the
order of experience, last in the order of nature and reason. They are
assumed, as he is fond of repeating, upon the condition that they shall
give an account of themselves and that the truth of their existence
shall be hereafter proved. For philosophy must begin somewhere and may
begin anywhere,--with outward objects, with statements of opinion, with
abstract principles. But objects of sense must lead us onward to the
ideas or universals which are contained in them; the statements of
opinion must be verified; the abstract principles must be filled up and
connected with one another. In Plato we find, as we might expect, the
germs of many thoughts which have been further developed by the genius
of Spinoza and Hegel. But there is a difficulty in separating the germ
from the flower, or in drawing the line which divides ancient
from modern philosophy. Many coincidences which occur in them are
unconscious, seeming to show a natural tendency in the human mind
towards certain ideas and forms of thought. And there are many
speculations of Plato which would have passed away unheeded, and
their meaning, like that of some hieroglyphic, would have remained
undeciphered, unless two thousand years and more afterwards an
interpreter had arisen of a kindred spirit and of the same intellectual
family. For example, in the Sophist Plato begins with the abstract and
goes on to the concrete, not in the lower sense of returning to outward
objects, but to the Hegelian concrete or unity of abstractions. In the
intervening period hardly any importance would have been attached to the
question which is so full of meaning to Plato and Hegel.

They differ however in their manner of regarding the question. For Plato
is answering a difficulty; he is seeking to justify the use of common
language and of ordinary thought into which philosophy had introduced
a principle of doubt and dissolution. Whereas Hegel tries to go beyond
common thought, and to combine abstractions in a higher unity: the
ordinary mechanism of language and logic is carried by him into another
region in which all oppositions are absorbed and all contradictions
affirmed, only that they may be done away with. But Plato, unlike Hegel,
nowhere bases his system on the unity of opposites, although in the
Parmenides he shows an Hegelian subtlety in the analysis of one and
Being.

It is difficult within the compass of a few pages to give even a
faint outline of the Hegelian dialectic. No philosophy which is worth
understanding can be understood in a moment; common sense will not teach
us metaphysics any more than mathematics. If all sciences demand of us
protracted study and attention, the highest of all can hardly be matter
of immediate intuition. Neither can we appreciate a great system without
yielding a half assent to it--like flies we are caught in the spider's
web; and we can only judge of it truly when we place ourselves at a
distance from it. Of all philosophies Hegelianism is the most obscure:
and the difficulty inherent in the subject is increased by the use of
a technical language. The saying of Socrates respecting the writings of
Heracleitus--'Noble is that which I understand, and that which I do not
understand may be as noble; but the strength of a Delian diver is needed
to swim through it'--expresses the feeling with which the reader rises
from the perusal of Hegel. We may truly apply to him the words in which
Plato describes the Pre-Socratic philosophers: 'He went on his way
rather regardless of whether we understood him or not'; or, as he is
reported himself to have said of his own pupils: 'There is only one of
you who understands me, and he does NOT understand me.'

Nevertheless the consideration of a few general aspects of the Hegelian
philosophy may help to dispel some errors and to awaken an interest
about it. (i) It is an ideal philosophy which, in popular phraseology,
maintains not matter but mind to be the truth of things, and this not by
a mere crude substitution of one word for another, but by showing
either of them to be the complement of the other. Both are creations of
thought, and the difference in kind which seems to divide them may also
be regarded as a difference of degree. One is to the other as the real
to the ideal, and both may be conceived together under the higher form
of the notion. (ii) Under another aspect it views all the forms of sense
and knowledge as stages of thought which have always existed implicitly
and unconsciously, and to which the mind of the world, gradually
disengaged from sense, has become awakened. The present has been the
past. The succession in time of human ideas is also the eternal 'now';
it is historical and also a divine ideal. The history of philosophy
stripped of personality and of the other accidents of time and place
is gathered up into philosophy, and again philosophy clothed in
circumstance expands into history. (iii) Whether regarded as present or
past, under the form of time or of eternity, the spirit of dialectic
is always moving onwards from one determination of thought to another,
receiving each successive system of philosophy and subordinating it to
that which follows--impelled by an irresistible necessity from one idea
to another until the cycle of human thought and existence is complete.
It follows from this that all previous philosophies which are worthy of
the name are not mere opinions or speculations, but stages or moments of
thought which have a necessary place in the world of mind. They are
no longer the last word of philosophy, for another and another has
succeeded them, but they still live and are mighty; in the language of
the Greek poet, 'There is a great God in them, and he grows not old.'
(iv) This vast ideal system is supposed to be based upon experience. At
each step it professes to carry with it the 'witness of eyes and
ears' and of common sense, as well as the internal evidence of its
own consistency; it has a place for every science, and affirms that
no philosophy of a narrower type is capable of comprehending all true
facts.

The Hegelian dialectic may be also described as a movement from the
simple to the complex. Beginning with the generalizations of sense, (1)
passing through ideas of quality, quantity, measure, number, and the
like, (2) ascending from presentations, that is pictorial forms of
sense, to representations in which the picture vanishes and the essence
is detached in thought from the outward form, (3) combining the I and
the not-I, or the subject and object, the natural order of thought is at
last found to include the leading ideas of the sciences and to arrange
them in relation to one another. Abstractions grow together and
again become concrete in a new and higher sense. They also admit
of development from within their own spheres. Everywhere there is
a movement of attraction and repulsion going on--an attraction or
repulsion of ideas of which the physical phenomenon described under a
similar name is a figure. Freedom and necessity, mind and matter, the
continuous and the discrete, cause and effect, are perpetually being
severed from one another in thought, only to be perpetually reunited.
The finite and infinite, the absolute and relative are not really
opposed; the finite and the negation of the finite are alike lost in a
higher or positive infinity, and the absolute is the sum or correlation
of all relatives. When this reconciliation of opposites is finally
completed in all its stages, the mind may come back again and review the
things of sense, the opinions of philosophers, the strife of theology
and politics, without being disturbed by them. Whatever is, if not
the very best--and what is the best, who can tell?--is, at any rate,
historical and rational, suitable to its own age, unsuitable to any
other. Nor can any efforts of speculative thinkers or of soldiers and
statesmen materially quicken the 'process of the suns.'

Hegel was quite sensible how great would be the difficulty of presenting
philosophy to mankind under the form of opposites. Most of us live
in the one-sided truth which the understanding offers to us, and
if occasionally we come across difficulties like the time-honoured
controversy of necessity and free-will, or the Eleatic puzzle of
Achilles and the tortoise, we relegate some of them to the sphere of
mystery, others to the book of riddles, and go on our way rejoicing.
Most men (like Aristotle) have been accustomed to regard a contradiction
in terms as the end of strife; to be told that contradiction is the life
and mainspring of the intellectual world is indeed a paradox to them.
Every abstraction is at first the enemy of every other, yet they are
linked together, each with all, in the chain of Being. The struggle for
existence is not confined to the animals, but appears in the kingdom of
thought. The divisions which arise in thought between the physical and
moral and between the moral and intellectual, and the like, are deepened
and widened by the formal logic which elevates the defects of the human
faculties into Laws of Thought; they become a part of the mind which
makes them and is also made up of them. Such distinctions become so
familiar to us that we regard the thing signified by them as absolutely
fixed and defined. These are some of the illusions from which Hegel
delivers us by placing us above ourselves, by teaching us to analyze
the growth of 'what we are pleased to call our minds,' by reverting to
a time when our present distinctions of thought and language had no
existence.

Of the great dislike and childish impatience of his system which would
be aroused among his opponents, he was fully aware, and would often
anticipate the jests which the rest of the world, 'in the superfluity
of their wits,' were likely to make upon him. Men are annoyed at what
puzzles them; they think what they cannot easily understand to be full
of danger. Many a sceptic has stood, as he supposed, firmly rooted in
the categories of the understanding which Hegel resolves into their
original nothingness. For, like Plato, he 'leaves no stone unturned'
in the intellectual world. Nor can we deny that he is unnecessarily
difficult, or that his own mind, like that of all metaphysicians, was
too much under the dominion of his system and unable to see beyond:
or that the study of philosophy, if made a serious business (compare
Republic), involves grave results to the mind and life of the student.
For it may encumber him without enlightening his path; and it may weaken
his natural faculties of thought and expression without increasing
his philosophical power. The mind easily becomes entangled among
abstractions, and loses hold of facts. The glass which is adapted to
distant objects takes away the vision of what is near and present to us.

To Hegel, as to the ancient Greek thinkers, philosophy was a religion, a
principle of life as well as of knowledge, like the idea of good in the
Sixth Book of the Republic, a cause as well as an effect, the source of
growth as well as of light. In forms of thought which by most of us are
regarded as mere categories, he saw or thought that he saw a gradual
revelation of the Divine Being. He would have been said by his opponents
to have confused God with the history of philosophy, and to have been
incapable of distinguishing ideas from facts. And certainly we can
scarcely understand how a deep thinker like Hegel could have hoped
to revive or supplant the old traditional faith by an unintelligible
abstraction: or how he could have imagined that philosophy consisted
only or chiefly in the categories of logic. For abstractions, though
combined by him in the notion, seem to be never really concrete; they
are a metaphysical anatomy, not a living and thinking substance. Though
we are reminded by him again and again that we are gathering up the
world in ideas, we feel after all that we have not really spanned the
gulf which separates phainomena from onta.

Having in view some of these difficulties, he seeks--and we may follow
his example--to make the understanding of his system easier (a)
by illustrations, and (b) by pointing out the coincidence of the
speculative idea and the historical order of thought.

(a) If we ask how opposites can coexist, we are told that many different
qualities inhere in a flower or a tree or in any other concrete object,
and that any conception of space or matter or time involves the two
contradictory attributes of divisibility and continuousness. We may
ponder over the thought of number, reminding ourselves that every unit
both implies and denies the existence of every other, and that the one
is many--a sum of fractions, and the many one--a sum of units. We may be
reminded that in nature there is a centripetal as well as a centrifugal
force, a regulator as well as a spring, a law of attraction as well as
of repulsion. The way to the West is the way also to the East; the north
pole of the magnet cannot be divided from the south pole; two minus
signs make a plus in Arithmetic and Algebra. Again, we may liken the
successive layers of thought to the deposits of geological strata which
were once fluid and are now solid, which were at one time uppermost in
the series and are now hidden in the earth; or to the successive rinds
or barks of trees which year by year pass inward; or to the ripple of
water which appears and reappears in an ever-widening circle. Or our
attention may be drawn to ideas which the moment we analyze them involve
a contradiction, such as 'beginning' or 'becoming,' or to the opposite
poles, as they are sometimes termed, of necessity and freedom, of idea
and fact. We may be told to observe that every negative is a positive,
that differences of kind are resolvable into differences of degree, and
that differences of degree may be heightened into differences of kind.
We may remember the common remark that there is much to be said on both
sides of a question. We may be recommended to look within and to explain
how opposite ideas can coexist in our own minds; and we may be told to
imagine the minds of all mankind as one mind in which the true ideas of
all ages and countries inhere. In our conception of God in his relation
to man or of any union of the divine and human nature, a contradiction
appears to be unavoidable. Is not the reconciliation of mind and body
a necessity, not only of speculation but of practical life? Reflections
such as these will furnish the best preparation and give the right
attitude of mind for understanding the Hegelian philosophy.

(b) Hegel's treatment of the early Greek thinkers affords the readiest
illustration of his meaning in conceiving all philosophy under the form
of opposites. The first abstraction is to him the beginning of thought.
Hitherto there had only existed a tumultuous chaos of mythological
fancy, but when Thales said 'All is water' a new era began to dawn upon
the world. Man was seeking to grasp the universe under a single form
which was at first simply a material element, the most equable and
colourless and universal which could be found. But soon the human mind
became dissatisfied with the emblem, and after ringing the changes
on one element after another, demanded a more abstract and perfect
conception, such as one or Being, which was absolutely at rest. But the
positive had its negative, the conception of Being involved Not-being,
the conception of one, many, the conception of a whole, parts. Then the
pendulum swung to the other side, from rest to motion, from Xenophanes
to Heracleitus. The opposition of Being and Not-being projected into
space became the atoms and void of Leucippus and Democritus. Until
the Atomists, the abstraction of the individual did not exist; in the
philosophy of Anaxagoras the idea of mind, whether human or divine,
was beginning to be realized. The pendulum gave another swing, from the
individual to the universal, from the object to the subject. The
Sophist first uttered the word 'Man is the measure of all things,' which
Socrates presented in a new form as the study of ethics. Once more we
return from mind to the object of mind, which is knowledge, and out
of knowledge the various degrees or kinds of knowledge more or less
abstract were gradually developed. The threefold division of logic,
physic, and ethics, foreshadowed in Plato, was finally established by
Aristotle and the Stoics. Thus, according to Hegel, in the course of
about two centuries by a process of antagonism and negation the leading
thoughts of philosophy were evolved.

There is nothing like this progress of opposites in Plato, who in the
Symposium denies the possibility of reconciliation until the opposition
has passed away. In his own words, there is an absurdity in supposing
that 'harmony is discord; for in reality harmony consists of notes of a
higher and lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by
the art of music' (Symp.). He does indeed describe objects of sense
as regarded by us sometimes from one point of view and sometimes from
another. As he says at the end of the Fifth Book of the Republic, 'There
is nothing light which is not heavy, or great which is not small.' And
he extends this relativity to the conceptions of just and good, as well
as to great and small. In like manner he acknowledges that the same
number may be more or less in relation to other numbers without any
increase or diminution (Theat.). But the perplexity only arises out of
the confusion of the human faculties; the art of measuring shows us what
is truly great and truly small. Though the just and good in particular
instances may vary, the IDEA of good is eternal and unchangeable. And
the IDEA of good is the source of knowledge and also of Being, in which
all the stages of sense and knowledge are gathered up and from being
hypotheses become realities.

Leaving the comparison with Plato we may now consider the value of
this invention of Hegel. There can be no question of the importance of
showing that two contraries or contradictories may in certain cases be
both true. The silliness of the so-called laws of thought ('All A = A,'
or, in the negative form, 'Nothing can at the same time be both A, and
not A') has been well exposed by Hegel himself (Wallace's Hegel), who
remarks that 'the form of the maxim is virtually self-contradictory,
for a proposition implies a distinction between subject and predicate,
whereas the maxim of identity, as it is called, A = A, does not fulfil
what its form requires. Nor does any mind ever think or form conceptions
in accordance with this law, nor does any existence conform to it.'
Wisdom of this sort is well parodied in Shakespeare (Twelfth Night,
'Clown: For as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink,
very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, "That that is is"...for
what is "that" but "that," and "is" but "is"?'). Unless we are willing
to admit that two contradictories may be true, many questions which lie
at the threshold of mathematics and of morals will be insoluble puzzles
to us.

The influence of opposites is felt in practical life. The understanding
sees one side of a question only--the common sense of mankind joins
one of two parties in politics, in religion, in philosophy. Yet, as
everybody knows, truth is not wholly the possession of either. But the
characters of men are one-sided and accept this or that aspect of the
truth. The understanding is strong in a single abstract principle and
with this lever moves mankind. Few attain to a balance of principles
or recognize truly how in all human things there is a thesis and
antithesis, a law of action and of reaction. In politics we require
order as well as liberty, and have to consider the proportions in which
under given circumstances they may be safely combined. In religion there
is a tendency to lose sight of morality, to separate goodness from
the love of truth, to worship God without attempting to know him.
In philosophy again there are two opposite principles, of immediate
experience and of those general or a priori truths which are supposed to
transcend experience. But the common sense or common opinion of mankind
is incapable of apprehending these opposite sides or views--men are
determined by their natural bent to one or other of them; they go
straight on for a time in a single line, and may be many things by turns
but not at once.

Hence the importance of familiarizing the mind with forms which will
assist us in conceiving or expressing the complex or contrary aspects
of life and nature. The danger is that they may be too much for us, and
obscure our appreciation of facts. As the complexity of mechanics cannot
be understood without mathematics, so neither can the many-sidedness of
the mental and moral world be truly apprehended without the assistance
of new forms of thought. One of these forms is the unity of opposites.
Abstractions have a great power over us, but they are apt to be partial
and one-sided, and only when modified by other abstractions do they make
an approach to the truth. Many a man has become a fatalist because he
has fallen under the dominion of a single idea. He says to himself, for
example, that he must be either free or necessary--he cannot be both.
Thus in the ancient world whole schools of philosophy passed away in the
vain attempt to solve the problem of the continuity or divisibility of
matter. And in comparatively modern times, though in the spirit of an
ancient philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, feeling a similar perplexity,
is inclined to deny the truth of infinitesimals in mathematics. Many
difficulties arise in practical religion from the impossibility of
conceiving body and mind at once and in adjusting their movements to one
another. There is a border ground between them which seems to belong to
both; and there is as much difficulty in conceiving the body without the
soul as the soul without the body. To the 'either' and 'or' philosophy
('Everything is either A or not A') should at least be added the clause
'or neither,' 'or both.' The double form makes reflection easier and
more conformable to experience, and also more comprehensive. But
in order to avoid paradox and the danger of giving offence to the
unmetaphysical part of mankind, we may speak of it as due to the
imperfection of language or the limitation of human faculties. It is
nevertheless a discovery which, in Platonic language, may be termed a
'most gracious aid to thought.'

The doctrine of opposite moments of thought or of progression by
antagonism, further assists us in framing a scheme or system of the
sciences. The negation of one gives birth to another of them. The double
notions are the joints which hold them together. The simple is developed
into the complex, the complex returns again into the simple. Beginning
with the highest notion of mind or thought, we may descend by a series
of negations to the first generalizations of sense. Or again we may
begin with the simplest elements of sense and proceed upwards to the
highest being or thought. Metaphysic is the negation or absorption of
physiology--physiology of chemistry--chemistry of mechanical philosophy.
Similarly in mechanics, when we can no further go we arrive at
chemistry--when chemistry becomes organic we arrive at physiology:
when we pass from the outward and animal to the inward nature of man we
arrive at moral and metaphysical philosophy. These sciences have each of
them their own methods and are pursued independently of one another.
But to the mind of the thinker they are all one--latent in one
another--developed out of one another.

This method of opposites has supplied new instruments of thought for the
solution of metaphysical problems, and has thrown down many of the walls
within which the human mind was confined. Formerly when philosophers
arrived at the infinite and absolute, they seemed to be lost in a region
beyond human comprehension. But Hegel has shown that the absolute and
infinite are no more true than the relative and finite, and that they
must alike be negatived before we arrive at a true absolute or a true
infinite. The conceptions of the infinite and absolute as ordinarily
understood are tiresome because they are unmeaning, but there is
no peculiar sanctity or mystery in them. We might as well make an
infinitesimal series of fractions or a perpetually recurring decimal
the object of our worship. They are the widest and also the thinnest of
human ideas, or, in the language of logicians, they have the greatest
extension and the least comprehension. Of all words they may be truly
said to be the most inflated with a false meaning. They have been
handed down from one philosopher to another until they have acquired a
religious character. They seem also to derive a sacredness from their
association with the Divine Being. Yet they are the poorest of the
predicates under which we describe him--signifying no more than this,
that he is not finite, that he is not relative, and tending to obscure
his higher attributes of wisdom, goodness, truth.

The system of Hegel frees the mind from the dominion of abstract ideas.
We acknowledge his originality, and some of us delight to wander in the
mazes of thought which he has opened to us. For Hegel has found admirers
in England and Scotland when his popularity in Germany has departed, and
he, like the philosophers whom he criticizes, is of the past. No other
thinker has ever dissected the human mind with equal patience and
minuteness. He has lightened the burden of thought because he has shown
us that the chains which we wear are of our own forging. To be able to
place ourselves not only above the opinions of men but above their
modes of thinking, is a great height of philosophy. This dearly obtained
freedom, however, we are not disposed to part with, or to allow him to
build up in a new form the 'beggarly elements' of scholastic logic
which he has thrown down. So far as they are aids to reflection and
expression, forms of thought are useful, but no further:--we may easily
have too many of them.

And when we are asked to believe the Hegelian to be the sole or
universal logic, we naturally reply that there are other ways in which
our ideas may be connected. The triplets of Hegel, the division into
being, essence, and notion, are not the only or necessary modes in which
the world of thought can be conceived. There may be an evolution by
degrees as well as by opposites. The word 'continuity' suggests the
possibility of resolving all differences into differences of quantity.
Again, the opposites themselves may vary from the least degree of
diversity up to contradictory opposition. They are not like numbers
and figures, always and everywhere of the same value. And therefore
the edifice which is constructed out of them has merely an imaginary
symmetry, and is really irregular and out of proportion. The spirit of
Hegelian criticism should be applied to his own system, and the terms
Being, Not-being, existence, essence, notion, and the like challenged
and defined. For if Hegel introduces a great many distinctions, he
obliterates a great many others by the help of the universal solvent 'is
not,' which appears to be the simplest of negations, and yet admits
of several meanings. Neither are we able to follow him in the play of
metaphysical fancy which conducts him from one determination of thought
to another. But we begin to suspect that this vast system is not God
within us, or God immanent in the world, and may be only the invention
of an individual brain. The 'beyond' is always coming back upon us
however often we expel it. We do not easily believe that we have within
the compass of the mind the form of universal knowledge. We rather
incline to think that the method of knowledge is inseparable from actual
knowledge, and wait to see what new forms may be developed out of
our increasing experience and observation of man and nature. We are
conscious of a Being who is without us as well as within us. Even
if inclined to Pantheism we are unwilling to imagine that the meagre
categories of the understanding, however ingeniously arranged or
displayed, are the image of God;--that what all religions were seeking
after from the beginning was the Hegelian philosophy which has been
revealed in the latter days. The great metaphysician, like a prophet of
old, was naturally inclined to believe that his own thoughts were divine
realities. We may almost say that whatever came into his head seemed
to him to be a necessary truth. He never appears to have criticized
himself, or to have subjected his own ideas to the process of analysis
which he applies to every other philosopher.

Hegel would have insisted that his philosophy should be accepted as a
whole or not at all. He would have urged that the parts derived their
meaning from one another and from the whole. He thought that he had
supplied an outline large enough to contain all future knowledge, and a
method to which all future philosophies must conform. His metaphysical
genius is especially shown in the construction of the categories--a work
which was only begun by Kant, and elaborated to the utmost by himself.
But is it really true that the part has no meaning when separated from
the whole, or that knowledge to be knowledge at all must be universal?
Do all abstractions shine only by the reflected light of other
abstractions? May they not also find a nearer explanation in their
relation to phenomena? If many of them are correlatives they are not
all so, and the relations which subsist between them vary from a mere
association up to a necessary connexion. Nor is it easy to determine
how far the unknown element affects the known, whether, for example, new
discoveries may not one day supersede our most elementary notions about
nature. To a certain extent all our knowledge is conditional upon
what may be known in future ages of the world. We must admit this
hypothetical element, which we cannot get rid of by an assumption that
we have already discovered the method to which all philosophy must
conform. Hegel is right in preferring the concrete to the abstract,
in setting actuality before possibility, in excluding from the
philosopher's vocabulary the word 'inconceivable.' But he is too well
satisfied with his own system ever to consider the effect of what is
unknown on the element which is known. To the Hegelian all things are
plain and clear, while he who is outside the charmed circle is in
the mire of ignorance and 'logical impurity': he who is within is
omniscient, or at least has all the elements of knowledge under his
hand.

Hegelianism may be said to be a transcendental defence of the world
as it is. There is no room for aspiration and no need of any: 'What is
actual is rational, what is rational is actual.' But a good man will not
readily acquiesce in this aphorism. He knows of course that all things
proceed according to law whether for good or evil. But when he sees
the misery and ignorance of mankind he is convinced that without any
interruption of the uniformity of nature the condition of the world may
be indefinitely improved by human effort. There is also an adaptation
of persons to times and countries, but this is very far from being the
fulfilment of their higher natures. The man of the seventeenth century
is unfitted for the eighteenth, and the man of the eighteenth for the
nineteenth, and most of us would be out of place in the world of a
hundred years hence. But all higher minds are much more akin than
they are different: genius is of all ages, and there is perhaps more
uniformity in excellence than in mediocrity. The sublimer intelligences
of mankind--Plato, Dante, Sir Thomas More--meet in a higher sphere
above the ordinary ways of men; they understand one another from
afar, notwithstanding the interval which separates them. They are 'the
spectators of all time and of all existence;' their works live for
ever; and there is nothing to prevent the force of their individuality
breaking through the uniformity which surrounds them. But such
disturbers of the order of thought Hegel is reluctant to acknowledge.

The doctrine of Hegel will to many seem the expression of an indolent
conservatism, and will at any rate be made an excuse for it. The mind of
the patriot rebels when he is told that the worst tyranny and oppression
has a natural fitness: he cannot be persuaded, for example, that the
conquest of Prussia by Napoleon I. was either natural or necessary,
or that any similar calamity befalling a nation should be a matter of
indifference to the poet or philosopher. We may need such a philosophy
or religion to console us under evils which are irremediable, but we see
that it is fatal to the higher life of man. It seems to say to us, 'The
world is a vast system or machine which can be conceived under the forms
of logic, but in which no single man can do any great good or any great
harm. Even if it were a thousand times worse than it is, it could be
arranged in categories and explained by philosophers. And what more do
we want?'

The philosophy of Hegel appeals to an historical criterion: the ideas
of men have a succession in time as well as an order of thought. But
the assumption that there is a correspondence between the succession of
ideas in history and the natural order of philosophy is hardly true even
of the beginnings of thought. And in later systems forms of thought
are too numerous and complex to admit of our tracing in them a regular
succession. They seem also to be in part reflections of the past, and it
is difficult to separate in them what is original and what is borrowed.
Doubtless they have a relation to one another--the transition from
Descartes to Spinoza or from Locke to Berkeley is not a matter of
chance, but it can hardly be described as an alternation of opposites or
figured to the mind by the vibrations of a pendulum. Even in Aristotle
and Plato, rightly understood, we cannot trace this law of action and
reaction. They are both idealists, although to the one the idea is
actual and immanent,--to the other only potential and transcendent, as
Hegel himself has pointed out (Wallace's Hegel). The true meaning of
Aristotle has been disguised from us by his own appeal to fact and the
opinions of mankind in his more popular works, and by the use made of
his writings in the Middle Ages. No book, except the Scriptures,
has been so much read, and so little understood. The Pre-Socratic
philosophies are simpler, and we may observe a progress in them; but is
there any regular succession? The ideas of Being, change, number, seem
to have sprung up contemporaneously in different parts of Greece and we
have no difficulty in constructing them out of one another--we can see
that the union of Being and Not-being gave birth to the idea of change
or Becoming and that one might be another aspect of Being. Again,
the Eleatics may be regarded as developing in one direction into
the Megarian school, in the other into the Atomists, but there is no
necessary connexion between them. Nor is there any indication that the
deficiency which was felt in one school was supplemented or compensated
by another. They were all efforts to supply the want which the Greeks
began to feel at the beginning of the sixth century before Christ,--the
want of abstract ideas. Nor must we forget the uncertainty of
chronology;--if, as Aristotle says, there were Atomists before
Leucippus, Eleatics before Xenophanes, and perhaps 'patrons of the
flux' before Heracleitus, Hegel's order of thought in the history
of philosophy would be as much disarranged as his order of religious
thought by recent discoveries in the history of religion.

Hegel is fond of repeating that all philosophies still live and that the
earlier are preserved in the later; they are refuted, and they are not
refuted, by those who succeed them. Once they reigned supreme, now they
are subordinated to a power or idea greater or more comprehensive
than their own. The thoughts of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle have
certainly sunk deep into the mind of the world, and have exercised an
influence which will never pass away; but can we say that they have
the same meaning in modern and ancient philosophy? Some of them, as
for example the words 'Being,' 'essence,' 'matter,' 'form,' either
have become obsolete, or are used in new senses, whereas 'individual,'
'cause,' 'motive,' have acquired an exaggerated importance. Is the
manner in which the logical determinations of thought, or 'categories'
as they may be termed, have been handed down to us, really different
from that in which other words have come down to us? Have they not
been equally subject to accident, and are they not often used by Hegel
himself in senses which would have been quite unintelligible to their
original inventors--as for example, when he speaks of the 'ground' of
Leibnitz ('Everything has a sufficient ground') as identical with
his own doctrine of the 'notion' (Wallace's Hegel), or the 'Being and
Not-being' of Heracleitus as the same with his own 'Becoming'?

As the historical order of thought has been adapted to the logical, so
we have reason for suspecting that the Hegelian logic has been in
some degree adapted to the order of thought in history. There is
unfortunately no criterion to which either of them can be subjected, and
not much forcing was required to bring either into near relations with
the other. We may fairly doubt whether the division of the first and
second parts of logic in the Hegelian system has not really arisen from
a desire to make them accord with the first and second stages of the
early Greek philosophy. Is there any reason why the conception of
measure in the first part, which is formed by the union of quality and
quantity, should not have been equally placed in the second division of
mediate or reflected ideas? The more we analyze them the less exact does
the coincidence of philosophy and the history of philosophy appear. Many
terms which were used absolutely in the beginning of philosophy, such
as 'Being,' 'matter,' 'cause,' and the like, became relative in
the subsequent history of thought. But Hegel employs some of them
absolutely, some relatively, seemingly without any principle and without
any regard to their original significance.

The divisions of the Hegelian logic bear a superficial resemblance to
the divisions of the scholastic logic. The first part answers to the
term, the second to the proposition, the third to the syllogism. These
are the grades of thought under which we conceive the world, first, in
the general terms of quality, quantity, measure; secondly, under the
relative forms of 'ground' and existence, substance and accidents, and
the like; thirdly in syllogistic forms of the individual mediated with
the universal by the help of the particular. Of syllogisms there are
various kinds,--qualitative, quantitative, inductive, mechanical,
teleological,--which are developed out of one another. But is there any
meaning in reintroducing the forms of the old logic? Who ever thinks
of the world as a syllogism? What connexion is there between the
proposition and our ideas of reciprocity, cause and effect, and similar
relations? It is difficult enough to conceive all the powers of nature
and mind gathered up in one. The difficulty is greatly increased
when the new is confused with the old, and the common logic is the
Procrustes' bed into which they are forced.

The Hegelian philosophy claims, as we have seen, to be based upon
experience: it abrogates the distinction of a priori and a posteriori
truth. It also acknowledges that many differences of kind are resolvable
into differences of degree. It is familiar with the terms 'evolution,'
'development,' and the like. Yet it can hardly be said to have
considered the forms of thought which are best adapted for the
expression of facts. It has never applied the categories to experience;
it has not defined the differences in our ideas of opposition, or
development, or cause and effect, in the different sciences which make
use of these terms. It rests on a knowledge which is not the result of
exact or serious enquiry, but is floating in the air; the mind has been
imperceptibly informed of some of the methods required in the sciences.
Hegel boasts that the movement of dialectic is at once necessary and
spontaneous: in reality it goes beyond experience and is unverified
by it. Further, the Hegelian philosophy, while giving us the power of
thinking a great deal more than we are able to fill up, seems to be
wanting in some determinations of thought which we require. We cannot
say that physical science, which at present occupies so large a share
of popular attention, has been made easier or more intelligible by the
distinctions of Hegel. Nor can we deny that he has sometimes interpreted
physics by metaphysics, and confused his own philosophical fancies with
the laws of nature. The very freedom of the movement is not without
suspicion, seeming to imply a state of the human mind which has entirely
lost sight of facts. Nor can the necessity which is attributed to it be
very stringent, seeing that the successive categories or determinations
of thought in different parts of his writings are arranged by the
philosopher in different ways. What is termed necessary evolution seems
to be only the order in which a succession of ideas presented themselves
to the mind of Hegel at a particular time.

The nomenclature of Hegel has been made by himself out of the language
of common life. He uses a few words only which are borrowed from his
predecessors, or from the Greek philosophy, and these generally in a
sense peculiar to himself. The first stage of his philosophy answers to
the word 'is,' the second to the word 'has been,' the third to the
words 'has been' and 'is' combined. In other words, the first sphere
is immediate, the second mediated by reflection, the third or highest
returns into the first, and is both mediate and immediate. As Luther's
Bible was written in the language of the common people, so Hegel seems
to have thought that he gave his philosophy a truly German character
by the use of idiomatic German words. But it may be doubted whether the
attempt has been successful. First because such words as 'in sich seyn,'
'an sich seyn,' 'an und fur sich seyn,' though the simplest combinations
of nouns and verbs, require a difficult and elaborate explanation. The
simplicity of the words contrasts with the hardness of their meaning.
Secondly, the use of technical phraseology necessarily separates
philosophy from general literature; the student has to learn a new
language of uncertain meaning which he with difficulty remembers. No
former philosopher had ever carried the use of technical terms to the
same extent as Hegel. The language of Plato or even of Aristotle is but
slightly removed from that of common life, and was introduced naturally
by a series of thinkers: the language of the scholastic logic has become
technical to us, but in the Middle Ages was the vernacular Latin of
priests and students. The higher spirit of philosophy, the spirit of
Plato and Socrates, rebels against the Hegelian use of language as
mechanical and technical.

Hegel is fond of etymologies and often seems to trifle with words. He
gives etymologies which are bad, and never considers that the meaning of
a word may have nothing to do with its derivation. He lived before the
days of Comparative Philology or of Comparative Mythology and Religion,
which would have opened a new world to him. He makes no allowance for
the element of chance either in language or thought; and perhaps there
is no greater defect in his system than the want of a sound theory
of language. He speaks as if thought, instead of being identical with
language, was wholly independent of it. It is not the actual growth
of the mind, but the imaginary growth of the Hegelian system, which is
attractive to him.

Neither are we able to say why of the common forms of thought some are
rejected by him, while others have an undue prominence given to them.
Some of them, such as 'ground' and 'existence,' have hardly any basis
either in language or philosophy, while others, such as 'cause' and
'effect,' are but slightly considered. All abstractions are supposed by
Hegel to derive their meaning from one another. This is true of some,
but not of all, and in different degrees. There is an explanation of
abstractions by the phenomena which they represent, as well as by their
relation to other abstractions. If the knowledge of all were necessary
to the knowledge of any one of them, the mind would sink under the load
of thought. Again, in every process of reflection we seem to require
a standing ground, and in the attempt to obtain a complete analysis we
lose all fixedness. If, for example, the mind is viewed as the complex
of ideas, or the difference between things and persons denied, such an
analysis may be justified from the point of view of Hegel: but we shall
find that in the attempt to criticize thought we have lost the power of
thinking, and, like the Heracliteans of old, have no words in which
our meaning can be expressed. Such an analysis may be of value as a
corrective of popular language or thought, but should still allow us to
retain the fundamental distinctions of philosophy.

In the Hegelian system ideas supersede persons. The world of thought,
though sometimes described as Spirit or 'Geist,' is really impersonal.
The minds of men are to be regarded as one mind, or more correctly as
a succession of ideas. Any comprehensive view of the world must
necessarily be general, and there may be a use with a view to
comprehensiveness in dropping individuals and their lives and actions.
In all things, if we leave out details, a certain degree of order
begins to appear; at any rate we can make an order which, with a little
exaggeration or disproportion in some of the parts, will cover the whole
field of philosophy. But are we therefore justified in saying that
ideas are the causes of the great movement of the world rather than the
personalities which conceived them? The great man is the expression of
his time, and there may be peculiar difficulties in his age which he
cannot overcome. He may be out of harmony with his circumstances, too
early or too late, and then all his thoughts perish; his genius passes
away unknown. But not therefore is he to be regarded as a mere waif
or stray in human history, any more than he is the mere creature or
expression of the age in which he lives. His ideas are inseparable from
himself, and would have been nothing without him. Through a thousand
personal influences they have been brought home to the minds of
others. He starts from antecedents, but he is great in proportion as he
disengages himself from them or absorbs himself in them. Moreover
the types of greatness differ; while one man is the expression of the
influences of his age, another is in antagonism to them. One man is
borne on the surface of the water; another is carried forward by the
current which flows beneath. The character of an individual, whether he
be independent of circumstances or not, inspires others quite as much
as his words. What is the teaching of Socrates apart from his personal
history, or the doctrines of Christ apart from the Divine life in which
they are embodied? Has not Hegel himself delineated the greatness of
the life of Christ as consisting in his 'Schicksalslosigkeit' or
independence of the destiny of his race? Do not persons become ideas,
and is there any distinction between them? Take away the five greatest
legislators, the five greatest warriors, the five greatest poets, the
five greatest founders or teachers of a religion, the five greatest
philosophers, the five greatest inventors,--where would have been all
that we most value in knowledge or in life? And can that be a true
theory of the history of philosophy which, in Hegel's own language,
'does not allow the individual to have his right'?

Once more, while we readily admit that the world is relative to the
mind, and the mind to the world, and that we must suppose a common or
correlative growth in them, we shrink from saying that this complex
nature can contain, even in outline, all the endless forms of Being and
knowledge. Are we not 'seeking the living among the dead' and dignifying
a mere logical skeleton with the name of philosophy and almost of God?
When we look far away into the primeval sources of thought and belief,
do we suppose that the mere accident of our being the heirs of the Greek
philosophers can give us a right to set ourselves up as having the true
and only standard of reason in the world? Or when we contemplate the
infinite worlds in the expanse of heaven can we imagine that a few
meagre categories derived from language and invented by the genius of
one or two great thinkers contain the secret of the universe? Or, having
regard to the ages during which the human race may yet endure, do we
suppose that we can anticipate the proportions human knowledge may
attain even within the short space of one or two thousand years?

Again, we have a difficulty in understanding how ideas can be causes,
which to us seems to be as much a figure of speech as the old notion
of a creator artist, 'who makes the world by the help of the demigods'
(Plato, Tim.), or with 'a golden pair of compasses' measures out the
circumference of the universe (Milton, P.L.). We can understand how
the idea in the mind of an inventor is the cause of the work which is
produced by it; and we can dimly imagine how this universal frame may