Philebus | Page 6

sense,
the greatest light appeared to be thrown on the nature of ideas when
they were contrasted with sense.
Both here and in the Parmenides, where similar difficulties are raised,
Plato seems prepared to desert his ancient ground. He cannot tell the
relation in which abstract ideas stand to one another, and therefore he
transfers the one and many out of his transcendental world, and
proceeds to lay down practical rules for their application to different
branches of knowledge. As in the Republic he supposes the philosopher
to proceed by regular steps, until he arrives at the idea of good; as in
the Sophist and Politicus he insists that in dividing the whole into its
parts we should bisect in the middle in the hope of finding species; as
in the Phaedrus (see above) he would have 'no limb broken' of the
organism of knowledge;-- so in the Philebus he urges the necessity of
filling up all the intermediate links which occur (compare Bacon's
'media axiomata') in the passage from unity to infinity. With him the
idea of science may be said to anticipate science; at a time when the
sciences were not yet divided, he wants to impress upon us the
importance of classification; neither neglecting the many individuals,
nor attempting to count them all, but finding the genera and species
under which they naturally fall. Here, then, and in the parallel passages
of the Phaedrus and of the Sophist, is found the germ of the most
fruitful notion of modern science.
Plato describes with ludicrous exaggeration the influence exerted by the
one and many on the minds of young men in their first fervour of
metaphysical enthusiasm (compare Republic). But they are none the
less an everlasting quality of reason or reasoning which never grows
old in us. At first we have but a confused conception of them,
analogous to the eyes blinking at the light in the Republic. To this Plato
opposes the revelation from Heaven of the real relations of them, which
some Prometheus, who gave the true fire from heaven, is supposed to
have imparted to us. Plato is speaking of two things--(1) the crude

notion of the one and many, which powerfully affects the ordinary
mind when first beginning to think; (2) the same notion when cleared
up by the help of dialectic.
To us the problem of the one and many has lost its chief interest and
perplexity. We readily acknowledge that a whole has many parts, that
the continuous is also the divisible, that in all objects of sense there is a
one and many, and that a like principle may be applied to analogy to
purely intellectual conceptions. If we attend to the meaning of the
words, we are compelled to admit that two contradictory statements are
true. But the antinomy is so familiar as to be scarcely observed by us.
Our sense of the contradiction, like Plato's, only begins in a higher
sphere, when we speak of necessity and free-will, of mind and body, of
Three Persons and One Substance, and the like. The world of
knowledge is always dividing more and more; every truth is at first the
enemy of every other truth. Yet without this division there can be no
truth; nor any complete truth without the reunion of the parts into a
whole. And hence the coexistence of opposites in the unity of the idea
is regarded by Hegel as the supreme principle of philosophy; and the
law of contradiction, which is affirmed by logicians to be an ultimate
principle of the human mind, is displaced by another law, which asserts
the coexistence of contradictories as imperfect and divided elements of
the truth. Without entering further into the depths of Hegelianism, we
may remark that this and all similar attempts to reconcile antinomies
have their origin in the old Platonic problem of the 'One and Many.'
II. 1. The first of Plato's categories or elements is the infinite. This is
the negative of measure or limit; the unthinkable, the unknowable; of
which nothing can be affirmed; the mixture or chaos which preceded
distinct kinds in the creation of the world; the first vague impression of
sense; the more or less which refuses to be reduced to rule, having
certain affinities with evil, with pleasure, with ignorance, and which in
the scale of being is farthest removed from the beautiful and good. To a
Greek of the age of Plato, the idea of an infinite mind would have been
an absurdity. He would have insisted that 'the good is of the nature of
the finite,' and that the infinite is a mere negative, which is on the level
of sensation, and not of thought. He was aware that there was a
distinction between the infinitely great and the infinitely