PHILEBUS.

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 (129 ff.), 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 original: "middle axioms"—Bacon’s term for principles that stand between the lowest particulars and the highest generalities) 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.

At p. 15, Plato describes with ludicrous exaggeration the influence exerted by the "one and many" on the minds of young men in their first fervor of metaphysical enthusiasm (cp. Rep. 539). 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 their real relations, which some Prometheus, who gave the true fire from heaven, is supposed to have imparted to us. Plato is speaking at pp. 15–16 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 (16 C–E).

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