ave 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