no
longer imagine 'Being' as in a state of change or division. To say that
the verb of existence is the copula, or that unity is a mere unit, is
to us easy; but to the Greek in a particular stage of thought such an
analysis involved the same kind of difficulty as the conception of God
existing both in and out of the world would to ourselves. Nor was he
assisted by the analogy of sensible objects. The sphere of mind was dark
and mysterious to him; but instead of being illustrated by 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 g