Sophist ..................................................................................................................................................................1

Plato.........................................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS. ....................................................................................................1

SOPHIST...............................................................................................................................................29

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

philosophyhere is the place at which Plato most nearly approaches to the Hegelian identity of Being and

Notbeing. 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 Notbeing, 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 preSocratic 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 crossdivision, 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

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

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 earthborn 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

meadowlands 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 Notbeing, which occupies the middle part of the work. For 'Notbeing' 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 'Notbeing' 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

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 'Notbeing:' (IV) the battle of the philosophers: (V) the relation

I. The Sophist in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the charlatan, the foreigner, the prince of

espritsfaux, 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

A milder tone is adopted towards the Sophists in a wellknown 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

differentthe 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

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

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

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

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

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

homemade, 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

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 Notbeing. 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 lawyerlike 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

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

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

III. The puzzle about 'Notbeing' 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 Notbeing: 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

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 Notbeing. 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 Notbeing 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

For their difficulty was not a practical but a metaphysical one; and their conception of falsehood was really

The strength of the illusion seems to lie in the alternative: If we once admit the existence of Being and

Notbeing, as two spheres which exclude each other, no Being or reality can be ascribed to Notbeing, and

therefore not to falsehood, which is the image or expression of Notbeing. 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 predecessorsthey are still ends to him, and not mere instruments of

thought. They are too roughhewn 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

The theory is, that Notbeing is relation. Notbeing 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

Notbeing; 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 Notbeing 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

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

But this evergrowing 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 answer is, that in these and all other determinations of any notion we are attributing to it 'Notbeing.' We

went in search of Notbeing and seemed to lose Being, and now in the hunt after Being we recover both.

Notbeing is a kind of Being, and in a sense coextensive with Being. And there are as many divisions of

Notbeing as of Being. To every positive idea'just,' 'beautiful,' and the like, there is a corresponding

A doubt may be raised whether this account of the negative is really the true one. The common logicians

would say that the 'notjust,' '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 'notjust' in or about the same class in which we might expect to find the 'just.'

'Notjust 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 'notjust' has no more meaning than

'nothonourable'that is to say, that the two cannot in any degree be distinguished, is clearly repugnant to

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 Notbeing, at all

touch the principle of contradiction. For what is asserted about Being and NotBeing only relates to our most

abstract notions, and in no way interferes with the principle of contradiction employed in the concrete.

Because Notbeing is identified with Other, or Being with Notbeing, this does not make the proposition

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 notbeautiful 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 'Notbeing' are inextricably blended.

Plato restricts the conception of Notbeing to difference. Man is a rational animal, and is notas 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

Nor is it easy to see how Notbeing any more than Sameness or Otherness is one of the classes of Being.

They are aspects rather than classes of Being. Notbeing 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 Notbeing is a more apt and intelligible expression of the same mental phenomenon. For Plato has not

distinguished between the Being which is prior to Notbeing, and the Being which is the negation of

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 Notbeing. 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

On the whole, we must allow that the great service rendered by Plato to metaphysics in the Sophist, is not his

explanation of 'Notbeing' as difference. With this he certainly laid the ghost of 'Notbeing'; 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

Notbeing 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 'Notbeing,' 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

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 overrefining

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

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 overaccuracy 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 Cynicsunless 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

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 Notbeing. In the Sophist the question is taken up again; the

nature of Notbeing 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

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 formsnow 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

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

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 meadowlands, 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, manstealer, 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?

But he is a manysided 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 artseller; 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,

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 vermindestroyer as

from the general. And she only desires to have a general name, which shall distinguish purifications of the

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 oldfashioned 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

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 noblydescended 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

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 invisibleabout 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

pencethis 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

And now, having got him in a corner of the dialectical net, let us divide and subdivide until we catch him. Of

imagemaking 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 notbeing. 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

notbeing is.' And the words prove themselves! Notbeing 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 notbeing. Therefore notbeing

cannot be predicated or expressed; for how can we say 'is,' 'are not,' without number?

And now arises the greatest difficulty of all. If notbeing is inconceivable, how can notbeing 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 notbeing which does not imply being and number. 'But I

cannot.' Then the Sophist must be left in his hole. We may call him an imagemaker 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 notreal 'is not'? 'Yes.' Then a likeness is really unreal, and essentially not.

Here is a pretty complication of being and notbeing, in which the manyheaded Sophist has entangled us.

He will at once point out that he is compelling us to contradict ourselves, by affirming being of notbeing. I

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 notbeing 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 notbeing. But if I

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

saythat 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 notbeing,

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 wholein 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

notbeing. 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 qualitieswisdom, 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 answerI am acquainted with them, Theaetetus, and know their ways better

than you dothat 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 contradictionshow 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 notbeing. 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

(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 ideasall 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 aparthe 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 notbeing, 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 notbeing 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 notbeing is the principle of the other which runs through all things,

being not excepted. And 'being' is one thing, and 'notbeing' 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 notjust as the just. And the essence of the notbeautiful is to be

separated from and opposed to a certain kind of existence which is termed beautiful. And this opposition and

negation is the notbeing 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 notbeingthat 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 notbeing, may still affirm that notbeing 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 notbeing, he may continue to argue that there is no such thing as the art of

imagemaking and phantastic, because notbeing has no place in language. Hence arises the necessity of

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

Then now let us return to our old division of likenessmaking 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 branchesproductive 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 imagemaking 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

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, notbeing, 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 sensethat 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 preSocratic 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

Notbeing from Being, and yet shows that the many are included in the one, and that Notbeing returns to

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

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

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

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 itlike 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 PreSocratic 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

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 followsimpelled 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 notI, 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 onan 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 bestand 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

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 onesided truth which the understanding offers to us, and if

occasionally we come across difficulties like the timehonoured controversy of necessity and freewill, 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

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

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 seeksand we may follow his exampleto make the

understanding of his system easier (a) by illustrations, and (b) by pointing out the coincidence of the

(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 onea 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

everwidening 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 Notbeing, 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 Notbeing 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

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

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 socalled 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 selfcontradictory, 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

The influence of opposites is felt in practical life. The understanding sees one side of a question onlythe

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 onesided 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 viewsmen are

determined by their natural bent to one or other of them; they go straight on for a time in a single line, and

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 manysidedness 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 onesided, 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 necessaryhe

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

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 chemistrychemistry of mechanical philosophy. Similarly in mechanics, when we can no

further go we arrive at chemistrywhen 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 onelatent in one anotherdeveloped 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 himsignifying 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,

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, Notbeing, 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

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

categoriesa 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

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 mankindPlato, Dante, Sir

Thomas Moremeet 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

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

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 anotherthe 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 anotherwe can see that the union of Being and Notbeing 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

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 inventorsas 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 Notbeing' 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

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 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

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

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,

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

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 be animated by a divine intelligence. But we

cannot conceive how all the thoughts of men that ever were, which are themselves subject to so many

external conditions of climate, country, and the like, even if regarded as the single thought of a Divine Being,

can be supposed to have made the world. We appear to be only wrapping up ourselves in our own

conceitsto be confusing cause and effectto be losing the distinction between reflection and action,

These are some of the doubts and suspicions which arise in the mind of a student of Hegel, when, after living

for a time within the charmed circle, he removes to a little distance and looks back upon what he has learnt,

from the vantageground of history and experience. The enthusiasm of his youth has passed away, the

authority of the master no longer retains a hold upon him. But he does not regret the time spent in the study

of him. He finds that he has received from him a real enlargement of mind, and much of the true spirit of

philosophy, even when he has ceased to believe in him. He returns again and again to his writings as to the

recollections of a first love, not undeserving of his admiration still. Perhaps if he were asked how he can

admire without believing, or what value he can attribute to what he knows to be erroneous, he might answer

1. That in Hegel he finds glimpses of the genius of the poet and of the common sense of the man of the world.

His system is not cast in a poetic form, but neither has all this load of logic extinguished in him the feeling of

poetry. He is the true countryman of his contemporaries Goethe and Schiller. Many fine expressions are

scattered up and down in his writings, as when he tells us that 'the Crusaders went to the Sepulchre but found

it empty.' He delights to find vestiges of his own philosophy in the older German mystics. And though he can

be scarcely said to have mixed much in the affairs of men, for, as his biographer tells us, 'he lived for thirty

years in a single room,' yet he is far from being ignorant of the world. No one can read his writings without

acquiring an insight into life. He loves to touch with the spear of logic the follies and self deceptions of

mankind, and make them appear in their natural form, stripped of the disguises of language and custom. He

will not allow men to defend themselves by an appeal to onesided or abstract principles. In this age of

reason any one can too easily find a reason for doing what he likes (Wallace). He is suspicious of a

distinction which is often made between a person's character and his conduct. His spirit is the opposite of that

of Jesuitism or casuistry (Wallace). He affords an example of a remark which has been often made, that in

order to know the world it is not necessary to have had a great experience of it.

2. Hegel, if not the greatest philosopher, is certainly the greatest critic of philosophy who ever lived. No one

else has equally mastered the opinions of his predecessors or traced the connexion of them in the same

manner. No one has equally raised the human mind above the trivialities of the common logic and the

unmeaningness of 'mere' abstractions, and above imaginary possibilities, which, as he truly says, have no

place in philosophy. No one has won so much for the kingdom of ideas. Whatever may be thought of his own

system it will hardly be denied that he has overthrown Locke, Kant, Hume, and the socalled philosophy of

common sense. He shows us that only by the study of metaphysics can we get rid of metaphysics, and that

those who are in theory most opposed to them are in fact most entirely and hopelessly enslaved by them: 'Die

reinen Physiker sind nur die Thiere.' The disciple of Hegel will hardly become the slave of any other

systemmaker. What Bacon seems to promise him he will find realized in the great German thinker, an

3. Many of those who are least disposed to become the votaries of Hegelianism nevertheless recognize in his

system a new logic supplying a variety of instruments and methods hitherto unemployed. We may not be able

to agree with him in assimilating the natural order of human thought with the history of philosophy, and still

less in identifying both with the divine idea or nature. But we may acknowledge that the great thinker has

thrown a light on many parts of human knowledge, and has solved many difficulties. We cannot receive his

doctrine of opposites as the last word of philosophy, but still we may regard it as a very important

contribution to logic. We cannot affirm that words have no meaning when taken out of their connexion in the

history of thought. But we recognize that their meaning is to a great extent due to association, and to their

correlation with one another. We see the advantage of viewing in the concrete what mankind regard only in

the abstract. There is much to be said for his faith or conviction, that God is immanent in the world,within

the sphere of the human mind, and not beyond it. It was natural that he himself, like a prophet of old, should

regard the philosophy which he had invented as the voice of God in man. But this by no means implies that

he conceived himself as creating God in thought. He was the servant of his own ideas and not the master of

them. The philosophy of history and the history of philosophy may be almost said to have been discovered by

him. He has done more to explain Greek thought than all other writers put together. Many ideas of

development, evolution, reciprocity, which have become the symbols of another school of thinkers may be

traced to his speculations. In the theology and philosophy of England as well as of Germany, and also in the

lighter literature of both countries, there are always appearing 'fragments of the great banquet' of Hegel.

THEODORUS: Here we are, Socrates, true to our agreement of yesterday; and we bring with us a stranger

SOCRATES: Is he not rather a god, Theodorus, who comes to us in the disguise of a stranger? For Homer

says that all the gods, and especially the god of strangers, are companions of the meek and just, and visit the

good and evil among men. And may not your companion be one of those higher powers, a crossexamining

deity, who has come to spy out our weakness in argument, and to crossexamine us?

THEODORUS: Nay, Socrates, he is not one of the disputatious sorthe is too good for that. And, in my

opinion, he is not a god at all; but divine he certainly is, for this is a title which I should give to all

SOCRATES: Capital, my friend! and I may add that they are almost as hard to be discerned as the gods. For

the true philosophers, and such as are not merely made up for the occasion, appear in various forms

unrecognized by the ignorance of men, and they 'hover about cities,' as Homer declares, looking from above

upon human life; and some think nothing of them, and others can never think enough; and sometimes they

appear as statesmen, and sometimes as sophists; and then, again, to many they seem to be no better than

madmen. I should like to ask our Eleatic friend, if he would tell us, what is thought about them in Italy, and to

SOCRATES: I want to know whether by his countrymen they are regarded as one or two; or do they, as the

THEODORUS: I dare say that the Stranger will not object to discuss the question. What do you say,

STRANGER: I am far from objecting, Theodorus, nor have I any difficulty in replying that by us they are

regarded as three. But to define precisely the nature of each of them is by no means a slight or easy task.

THEODORUS: You have happened to light, Socrates, almost on the very question which we were asking

our friend before we came hither, and he excused himself to us, as he does now to you; although he admitted

SOCRATES: Then do not, Stranger, deny us the first favour which we ask of you: I am sure that you will

not, and therefore I shall only beg of you to say whether you like and are accustomed to make a long oration

on a subject which you want to explain to another, or to proceed by the method of question and answer. I

remember hearing a very noble discussion in which Parmenides employed the latter of the two methods,

STRANGER: I prefer to talk with another when he responds pleasantly, and is light in hand; if not, I would

SOCRATES: Any one of the present company will respond kindly to you, and you can choose whom you

like of them; I should recommend you to take a young personTheaetetus, for exampleunless you have a

STRANGER: I feel ashamed, Socrates, being a newcomer into your society, instead of talking a little and

hearing others talk, to be spinning out a long soliloquy or address, as if I wanted to show off. For the true

answer will certainly be a very long one, a great deal longer than might be expected from such a short and

simple question. At the same time, I fear that I may seem rude and ungracious if I refuse your courteous

request, especially after what you have said. For I certainly cannot object to your proposal, that Theaetetus

should respond, having already conversed with him myself, and being recommended by you to take him.

THEAETETUS: But are you sure, Stranger, that this will be quite so acceptable to the rest of the company

STRANGER: You hear them applauding, Theaetetus; after that, there is nothing more to be said. Well then,

I am to argue with you, and if you tire of the argument, you may complain of your friends and not of me.

THEAETETUS: I do not think that I shall tire, and if I do, I shall get my friend here, young Socrates, the

namesake of the elder Socrates, to help; he is about my own age, and my partner at the gymnasium, and is

STRANGER: Very good; you can decide about that for yourself as we proceed. Meanwhile you and I will

begin together and enquire into the nature of the Sophist, first of the three: I should like you to make out what

he is and bring him to light in a discussion; for at present we are only agreed about the name, but of the thing

to which we both apply the name possibly you have one notion and I another; whereas we ought always to

come to an understanding about the thing itself in terms of a definition, and not merely about the name minus

the definition. Now the tribe of Sophists which we are investigating is not easily caught or defined; and the

world has long ago agreed, that if great subjects are to be adequately treated, they must be studied in the

lesser and easier instances of them before we proceed to the greatest of all. And as I know that the tribe of

Sophists is troublesome and hard to be caught, I should recommend that we practise beforehand the method

which is to be applied to him on some simple and smaller thing, unless you can suggest a better way.

STRANGER: Then suppose that we work out some lesser example which will be a pattern of the greater?

STRANGER: What is there which is well known and not great, and is yet as susceptible of definition as any

larger thing? Shall I say an angler? He is familiar to all of us, and not a very interesting or important person.

STRANGER: Yet I suspect that he will furnish us with the sort of definition and line of enquiry which we

STRANGER: Let us begin by asking whether he is a man having art or not having art, but some other

STRANGER: There is agriculture, and the tending of mortal creatures, and the art of constructing or

moulding vessels, and there is the art of imitationall these may be appropriately called by a single name.

STRANGER: He who brings into existence something that did not exist before is said to be a producer, and

STRANGER: And all the arts which were just now mentioned are characterized by this power of producing?

STRANGER: Next follows the whole class of learning and cognition; then comes trade, fighting, hunting.

And since none of these produces anything, but is only engaged in conquering by word or deed, or in

preventing others from conquering, things which exist and have been already producedin each and all of

STRANGER: Seeing, then, that all arts are either acquisitive or creative, in which class shall we place the art

STRANGER: And the acquisitive may be subdivided into two parts: there is exchange, which is voluntary

and is effected by gifts, hire, purchase; and the other part of acquisitive, which takes by force of word or

STRANGER: Open force may be called fighting, and secret force may have the general name of hunting?

STRANGER: And there is no reason why the art of hunting should not be further divided.

STRANGER: Of course they exist; but the hunting after lifeless things having no special name, except some

sorts of diving, and other small matters, may be omitted; the hunting after living things may be called animal

STRANGER: And animal hunting may be truly said to have two divisions, landanimal hunting, which has

many kinds and names, and wateranimal hunting, or the hunting after animals who swim?

STRANGER: And of swimming animals, one class lives on the wing and the other in the water?

STRANGER: Fowling is the general term under which the hunting of all birds is included.

STRANGER: The hunting of animals who live in the water has the general name of fishing.

STRANGER: And this sort of hunting may be further divided also into two principal kinds?

STRANGER: There is one kind which takes them in nets, another which takes them by a blow.

STRANGER: As to the first kindall that surrounds and encloses anything to prevent egress, may be

STRANGER: For which reason twig baskets, castingnets, nooses, creels, and the like may all be termed

STRANGER: And therefore this first kind of capture may be called by us capture with enclosures, or

STRANGER: The other kind, which is practised by a blow with hooks and threepronged spears, when

summed up under one name, may be called striking, unless you, Theaetetus, can find some better name?

STRANGER: There is one mode of striking, which is done at night, and by the light of a fire, and is by the

STRANGER: And the fishing by day is called by the general name of barbing, because the spears, too, are

STRANGER: Of this barbfishing, that which strikes the fish who is below from above is called spearing,

STRANGER: When a hook is used, and the fish is not struck in any chance part of his body, as he is with

the spear, but only about the head and mouth, and is then drawn out from below upwards with reeds and

STRANGER: Then now you and I have come to an understanding not only about the name of the angler's

art, but about the definition of the thing itself. One half of all art was acquisitivehalf of the acquisitive art

was conquest or taking by force, half of this was hunting, and half of hunting was hunting animals, half of

this was hunting water animalsof this again, the under half was fishing, half of fishing was striking; a part

of striking was fishing with a barb, and one half of this again, being the kind which strikes with a hook and

draws the fish from below upwards, is the art which we have been seeking, and which from the nature of the

STRANGER: And now, following this pattern, let us endeavour to find out what a Sophist is.

STRANGER: The first question about the angler was, whether he was a skilled artist or unskilled?

STRANGER: And shall we call our new friend unskilled, or a thorough master of his craft?

THEAETETUS: Certainly not unskilled, for his name, as, indeed, you imply, must surely express his nature.

STRANGER: You remember our division of hunting, into hunting after swimming animals and land

STRANGER: And you remember that we subdivided the swimming and left the land animals, saying that

STRANGER: Thus far, then, the Sophist and the angler, starting from the art of acquiring, take the same

STRANGER: Their paths diverge when they reach the art of animal hunting; the one going to the seashore,

and to the rivers and to the lakes, and angling for the animals which are in them.

STRANGER: While the other goes to land and water of another sortrivers of wealth and broad

meadowlands of generous youth; and he also is intending to take the animals which are in them.

STRANGER: Yes, if you include man under tame animals. But if you like you may say that there are no

tame animals, or that, if there are, man is not among them; or you may say that man is a tame animal but is

THEAETETUS: I should say, Stranger, that man is a tame animal, and I admit that he is hunted.

STRANGER: Let us define piracy, manstealing, tyranny, the whole military art, by one name, as hunting

STRANGER: But the art of the lawyer, of the popular orator, and the art of conversation may be called in

STRANGER: And of private hunting, one sort receives hire, and the other brings gifts.

STRANGER: I mean that they lavish gifts on those whom they hunt in addition to other inducements.

STRANGER: But that sort of hireling whose conversation is pleasing and who baits his hook only with

pleasure and exacts nothing but his maintenance in return, we should all, if I am not mistaken, describe as

STRANGER: And that sort, which professes to form acquaintances only for the sake of virtue, and demands

THEAETETUS: It is obvious enough; for I believe that we have discovered the Sophist: which is, as I

STRANGER: Then now, Theaetetus, his art may be traced as a branch of the appropriative, acquisitive

hire,taking money in exchange having the semblance of education; and this is termed Sophistry, and is a

STRANGER: Let us take another branch of his genealogy; for he is a professor of a great and manysided

art; and if we look back at what has preceded we see that he presents another aspect, besides that of which we

STRANGER: There were two sorts of acquisitive art; the one concerned with hunting, the other with

STRANGER: And of the art of exchange there are two divisions, the one of giving, and the other of selling.

STRANGER: Next, we will suppose the art of selling to be divided into two parts.

STRANGER: There is one part which is distinguished as the sale of a man's own productions; another,

STRANGER: And is not that part of exchange which takes place in the city, being about half of the whole,

STRANGER: And that which exchanges the goods of one city for those of another by selling and buying is

STRANGER: And you are aware that this exchange of the merchant is of two kinds: it is partly concerned

with food for the use of the body, and partly with the food of the soul which is bartered and received in

STRANGER: You want to know what is the meaning of food for the soul; the other kind you surely

STRANGER: Take music in general and painting and marionette playing and many other things, which are

purchased in one city, and carried away and sold in anotherwares of the soul which are hawked about

either for the sake of instruction or amusement;may not he who takes them about and sells them be quite

STRANGER: And would you not call by the same name him who buys up knowledge and goes about from

STRANGER: Of this merchandise of the soul, may not one part be fairly termed the art of display? And

there is another part which is certainly not less ridiculous, but being a trade in learning must be called by

STRANGER: The latter should have two names,one descriptive of the sale of the knowledge of virtue,

STRANGER: The name of artseller corresponds well enough to the latter; but you must try and tell me the

THEAETETUS: He must be the Sophist, whom we are seeking; no other name can possibly be right.

STRANGER: No other; and so this trader in virtue again turns out to be our friend the Sophist, whose art

may now be traced from the art of acquisition through exchange, trade, merchandise, to a merchandise of the

STRANGER: And there may be a third reappearance of him;for he may have settled down in a city, and

may fabricate as well as buy these same wares, intending to live by selling them, and he would still be called

STRANGER: Then that part of the acquisitive art which exchanges, and of exchange which either sells a

man's own productions or retails those of others, as the case may be, and in either way sells the knowledge of

STRANGER: Let us consider once more whether there may not be yet another aspect of sophistry.

STRANGER: In the acquisitive there was a subdivision of the combative or fighting art.

STRANGER: There shall be one division of the competitive, and another of the pugnacious.

STRANGER: That part of the pugnacious which is a contest of bodily strength may be properly called by

STRANGER: When long speeches are answered by long speeches, and there is public discussion about the

STRANGER: And there is a private sort of controversy, which is cut up into questions and answers, and this

STRANGER: And of disputation, that sort which is only a discussion about contracts, and is carried on at

random, and without rules of art, is recognized by the reasoning faculty to be a distinct class, but has hitherto

STRANGER: But that which proceeds by rules of art to dispute about justice and injustice in their own

nature, and about things in general, we have been accustomed to call argumentation (Eristic)?

STRANGER: And of argumentation, one sort wastes money, and the other makes money.

STRANGER: I should say that the habit which leads a man to neglect his own affairs for the pleasure of

conversation, of which the style is far from being agreeable to the majority of his hearers, may be fairly

STRANGER: But now who the other is, who makes money out of private disputation, it is your turn to say.

THEAETETUS: There is only one true answer: he is the wonderful Sophist, of whom we are in pursuit, and

STRANGER: Yes, and with a fresh pedigree, for he is the moneymaking species of the Eristic,

disputatious, controversial, pugnacious, combative, acquisitive family, as the argument has already proven.

STRANGER: How true was the observation that he was a manysided animal, and not to be caught with one

STRANGER: Yes, we must, if we can. And therefore let us try another track in our pursuit of him: You are

aware that there are certain menial occupations which have names among servants?

STRANGER: And besides these there are a great many more, such as carding, spinning, adjusting the warp

THEAETETUS: Of what are they to be patterns, and what are we going to do with them all?

STRANGER: Then if, as I was saying, there is one art which includes all of them, ought not that art to have

STRANGER: In all the previously named processes either like has been separated from like or the better

STRANGER: There is no name for the first kind of separation; of the second, which throws away the worse

STRANGER: Every discernment or discrimination of that kind, as I have observed, is called a purification.

THEAETETUS: Perhaps so, if he were allowed time to think; but I do not see at this moment.

STRANGER: There are many purifications of bodies which may with propriety be comprehended under a

STRANGER: There is the purification of living bodies in their inward and in their outward parts, of which

the former is duly effected by medicine and gymnastic, the latter by the not very dignified art of the

bathman; and there is the purification of inanimate substancesto this the arts of fulling and of furbishing

in general attend in a number of minute particulars, having a variety of names which are thought ridiculous.

STRANGER: There can be no doubt that they are thought ridiculous, Theaetetus; but then the dialectical art

never considers whether the benefit to be derived from the purge is greater or less than that to be derived

from the sponge, and has not more interest in the one than in the other; her endeavour is to know what is and

is not kindred in all arts, with a view to the acquisition of intelligence; and having this in view, she honours

them all alike, and when she makes comparisons, she counts one of them not a whit more ridiculous than

another; nor does she esteem him who adduces as his example of hunting, the general's art, at all more

decorous than another who cites that of the vermindestroyer, but only as the greater pretender of the two.

And as to your question concerning the name which was to comprehend all these arts of purification, whether

of animate or inanimate bodies, the art of dialectic is in no wise particular about fine words, if she may be

only allowed to have a general name for all other purifications, binding them up together and separating them

off from the purification of the soul or intellect. For this is the purification at which she wants to arrive, and

THEAETETUS: Yes, I understand; and I agree that there are two sorts of purification, and that one of them

is concerned with the soul, and that there is another which is concerned with the body.

STRANGER: Excellent; and now listen to what I am going to say, and try to divide further the first of the

THEAETETUS: Whatever line of division you suggest, I will endeavour to assist you.

STRANGER: And purification was to leave the good and to cast out whatever is bad?

STRANGER: Then any taking away of evil from the soul may be properly called purification?

STRANGER: The one may be compared to disease in the body, the other to deformity.

STRANGER: Perhaps you have never reflected that disease and discord are the same.

STRANGER: Do you not conceive discord to be a dissolution of kindred elements, originating in some

STRANGER: And is deformity anything but the want of measure, which is always unsightly?

STRANGER: And do we not see that opinion is opposed to desire, pleasure to anger, reason to pain, and that

STRANGER: Then we shall be right in calling vice a discord and disease of the soul?

STRANGER: And when things having motion, and aiming at an appointed mark, continually miss their aim

and glance aside, shall we say that this is the effect of symmetry among them, or of the want of symmetry?

STRANGER: And what is ignorance but the aberration of a mind which is bent on truth, and in which the

STRANGER: Then we are to regard an unintelligent soul as deformed and devoid of symmetry?

STRANGER: Then there are these two kinds of evil in the soulthe one which is generally called vice, and

STRANGER: And there is the other, which they call ignorance, and which, because existing only in the soul,

THEAETETUS: I certainly admit what I at first disputedthat there are two kinds of vice in the soul, and

that we ought to consider cowardice, intemperance, and injustice to be alike forms of disease in the soul, and

STRANGER: And in the case of the body are there not two arts which have to do with the two bodily states?

STRANGER: There is gymnastic, which has to do with deformity, and medicine, which has to do with

STRANGER: And where there is insolence and injustice and cowardice, is not chastisement the art which is

STRANGER: Again, of the various kinds of ignorance, may not instruction be rightly said to be the remedy?

STRANGER: And of the art of instruction, shall we say that there is one or many kinds? At any rate there

STRANGER: I believe that I can see how we shall soonest arrive at the answer to this question.

STRANGER: If we can discover a line which divides ignorance into two halves. For a division of ignorance

into two parts will certainly imply that the art of instruction is also twofold, answering to the two divisions of

STRANGER: I do seem to myself to see one very large and bad sort of ignorance which is quite separate,

and may be weighed in the scale against all other sorts of ignorance put together.

STRANGER: When a person supposes that he knows, and does not know; this appears to be the great source

STRANGER: And this, if I am not mistaken, is the kind of ignorance which specially earns the title of

STRANGER: What name, then, shall be given to the sort of instruction which gets rid of this?

THEAETETUS: The instruction which you mean, Stranger, is, I should imagine, not the teaching of

handicraft arts, but what, thanks to us, has been termed education in this part the world.

STRANGER: Yes, Theaetetus, and by nearly all Hellenes. But we have still to consider whether education

STRANGER: There is the timehonoured mode which our fathers commonly practised towards their sons,

and which is still adopted by manyeither of roughly reproving their errors, or of gently advising them;

STRANGER: But whereas some appear to have arrived at the conclusion that all ignorance is involuntary,

and that no one who thinks himself wise is willing to learn any of those things in which he is conscious of his

own cleverness, and that the admonitory sort of instruction gives much trouble and does little good

STRANGER: Accordingly, they set to work to eradicate the spirit of conceit in another way.

STRANGER: They crossexamine a man's words, when he thinks that he is saying something and is really

saying nothing, and easily convict him of inconsistencies in his opinions; these they then collect by the

dialectical process, and placing them side by side, show that they contradict one another about the same

things, in relation to the same things, and in the same respect. He, seeing this, is angry with himself, and

grows gentle towards others, and thus is entirely delivered from great prejudices and harsh notions, in a way

which is most amusing to the hearer, and produces the most lasting good effect on the person who is the

subject of the operation. For as the physician considers that the body will receive no benefit from taking food

until the internal obstacles have been removed, so the purifier of the soul is conscious that his patient will

receive no benefit from the application of knowledge until he is refuted, and from refutation learns modesty;

he must be purged of his prejudices first and made to think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.

STRANGER: For all these reasons, Theaetetus, we must admit that refutation is the greatest and chiefest of

purifications, and he who has not been refuted, though he be the Great King himself, is in an awful state of

impurity; he is uninstructed and deformed in those things in which he who would be truly blessed ought to be

STRANGER: And who are the ministers of this art? I am afraid to say the Sophists.

THEAETETUS: Yet the Sophist has a certain likeness to our minister of purification.

STRANGER: Yes, the same sort of likeness which a wolf, who is the fiercest of animals, has to a dog, who

is the gentlest. But he who would not be found tripping, ought to be very careful in this matter of

comparisons, for they are most slippery things. Nevertheless, let us assume that the Sophists are the men. I

say this provisionally, for I think that the line which divides them will be marked enough if proper care is

STRANGER: Let us grant, then, that from the discerning art comes purification, and from purification let

there be separated off a part which is concerned with the soul; of this mental purification instruction is a

portion, and of instruction education, and of education, that refutation of vain conceit which has been

discovered in the present argument; and let this be called by you and me the noblydescended art of

THEAETETUS: Very well; and yet, considering the number of forms in which he has presented himself, I

begin to doubt how I can with any truth or confidence describe the real nature of the Sophist.

STRANGER: You naturally feel perplexed; and yet I think that he must be still more perplexed in his

attempt to escape us, for as the proverb says, when every way is blocked, there is no escape; now, then, is the

STRANGER: First let us wait a moment and recover breath, and while we are resting, we may reckon up in

how many forms he has appeared. In the first place, he was discovered to be a paid hunter after wealth and

STRANGER: In the third place, he has turned out to be a retailer of the same sort of wares.

THEAETETUS: Yes; and in the fourth place, he himself manufactured the learned wares which he sold.

STRANGER: Quite right; I will try and remember the fifth myself. He belonged to the fighting class, and

STRANGER: The sixth point was doubtful, and yet we at last agreed that he was a purger of souls, who

STRANGER: Do you not see that when the professor of any art has one name and many kinds of

knowledge, there must be something wrong? The multiplicity of names which is applied to him shows that

the common principle to which all these branches of knowledge are tending, is not understood.

STRANGER: At any rate we will understand him, and no indolence shall prevent us. Let us begin again,

then, and reexamine some of our statements concerning the Sophist; there was one thing which appeared to

STRANGER: And about what does he profess that he teaches men to dispute? To begin at the

beginningDoes he make them able to dispute about divine things, which are invisible to men in general?

STRANGER: And what do you say of the visible things in heaven and earth, and the like?

STRANGER: Then, again, in private conversation, when any universal assertion is made about generation

and essence, we know that such persons are tremendous argufiers, and are able to impart their own skill to

STRANGER: And do they not profess to make men able to dispute about law and about politics in general?

THEAETETUS: Why, no one would have anything to say to them, if they did not make these professions.

STRANGER: In all and every art, what the craftsman ought to say in answer to any question is written down

THEAETETUS: I suppose that you are referring to the precepts of Protagoras about wrestling and the other

STRANGER: Yes, my friend, and about a good many other things. In a word, is not the art of disputation a

STRANGER: But oh! my dear youth, do you suppose this possible? for perhaps your young eyes may see

THEAETETUS: To what are you alluding? I do not think that I understand your present question.

SOCRATES: But how can any one who is ignorant dispute in a rational manner against him who knows?

STRANGER: How do the Sophists make young men believe in their supreme and universal wisdom? For if

they neither disputed nor were thought to dispute rightly, or being thought to do so were deemed no wiser for

their controversial skill, then, to quote your own observation, no one would give them money or be willing to

STRANGER: Yes, and the reason, as I should imagine, is that they are supposed to have knowledge of those

STRANGER: Then the Sophist has been shown to have a sort of conjectural or apparent knowledge only of

STRANGER: Let us now take an illustration, which will still more clearly explain his nature.

STRANGER: I will tell you, and you shall answer me, giving your very closest attention. Suppose that a

person were to profess, not that he could speak or dispute, but that he knew how to make and do all things, by

STRANGER: I see that you do not understand the first word that I utter, for you do not understand the

STRANGER: Suppose a person to say that he will make you and me, and all creatures.

THEAETETUS: What would he mean by 'making'? He cannot be a husbandman; for you said that he is a

STRANGER: Yes; and I say that he is also the maker of the sea, and the earth, and the heavens, and the

gods, and of all other things; and, further, that he can make them in no time, and sell them for a few pence.

STRANGER: And when a man says that he knows all things, and can teach them to another at a small cost,

STRANGER: And is there any more artistic or graceful form of jest than imitation?

THEAETETUS: Certainly not; and imitation is a very comprehensive term, which includes under one class

STRANGER: We know, of course, that he who professes by one art to make all things is really a painter,

and by the painter's art makes resemblances of real things which have the same name with them; and he can

deceive the less intelligent sort of young children, to whom he shows his pictures at a distance, into the belief

STRANGER: And may there not be supposed to be an imitative art of reasoning? Is it not possible to

enchant the hearts of young men by words poured through their ears, when they are still at a distance from the

truth of facts, by exhibiting to them fictitious arguments, and making them think that they are true, and that

STRANGER: But as time goes on, and their hearers advance in years, and come into closer contact with

realities, and have learnt by sad experience to see and feel the truth of things, are not the greater part of them

compelled to change many opinions which they formerly entertained, so that the great appears small to them,

and the easy difficult, and all their dreamy speculations are overturned by the facts of life?

THEAETETUS: That is my view, as far as I can judge, although, at my age, I may be one of those who see

STRANGER: And the wish of all of us, who are your friends, is and always will be to bring you as near to

the truth as we can without the sad reality. And now I should like you to tell me, whether the Sophist is not

visibly a magician and imitator of true being; or are we still disposed to think that he may have a true

THEAETETUS: But how can he, Stranger? Is there any doubt, after what has been said, that he is to be

STRANGER: And now our business is not to let the animal out, for we have got him in a sort of dialectical

STRANGER: Then, clearly, we ought as soon as possible to divide the image making art, and go down into

the net, and, if the Sophist does not run away from us, to seize him according to orders and deliver him over

to reason, who is the lord of the hunt, and proclaim the capture of him; and if he creeps into the recesses of

the imitative art, and secretes himself in one of them, to divide again and follow him up until in some

subsection of imitation he is caught. For our method of tackling each and all is one which neither he nor any

STRANGER: Well, then, pursuing the same analytic method as before, I think that I can discern two

divisions of the imitative art, but I am not as yet able to see in which of them the desired form is to be found.

THEAETETUS: Will you tell me first what are the two divisions of which you are speaking?

STRANGER: One is the art of likenessmaking;generally a likeness of anything is made by producing a

copy which is executed according to the proportions of the original, similar in length and breadth and depth,

STRANGER: Not always; in works either of sculpture or of painting, which are of any magnitude, there is a

certain degree of deception; for artists were to give the true proportions of their fair works, the upper part,

which is farther off, would appear to be out of proportion in comparison with the lower, which is nearer; and

so they give up the truth in their images and make only the proportions which appear to be beautiful,

STRANGER: And that which being other is also like, may we not fairly call a likeness or image?

STRANGER: And may we not, as I did just now, call that part of the imitative art which is concerned with

STRANGER: And what shall we call those resemblances of the beautiful, which appear such owing to the

unfavourable position of the spectator, whereas if a person had the power of getting a correct view of works

of such magnitude, they would appear not even like that to which they profess to be like? May we not call

STRANGER: There is a great deal of this kind of thing in painting, and in all imitation.

STRANGER: And may we not fairly call the sort of art, which produces an appearance and not an image,

STRANGER: These then are the two kinds of imagemakingthe art of making likenesses, and phantastic

STRANGER: I was doubtful before in which of them I should place the Sophist, nor am I even now able to

see clearly; verily he is a wonderful and inscrutable creature. And now in the cleverest manner he has got into

STRANGER: Do you speak advisedly, or are you carried away at the moment by the habit of assenting into

STRANGER: My dear friend, we are engaged in a very difficult speculation there can be no doubt of that;

for how a thing can appear and seem, and not be, or how a man can say a thing which is not true, has always

been and still remains a very perplexing question. Can any one say or think that falsehood really exists, and

avoid being caught in a contradiction? Indeed, Theaetetus, the task is a difficult one.

STRANGER: He who says that falsehood exists has the audacity to assert the being of notbeing; for this is

implied in the possibility of falsehood. But, my boy, in the days when I was a boy, the great Parmenides

protested against this doctrine, and to the end of his life he continued to inculcate the same lessonalways

'Keep your mind from this way of enquiry, for never will you show that not being is.'

Such is his testimony, which is confirmed by the very expression when sifted a little. Would you object to

THEAETETUS: Never mind about me; I am only desirous that you should carry on the argument in the best

STRANGER: Very good; and now say, do we venture to utter the forbidden word 'notbeing'?

STRANGER: Let us be serious then, and consider the question neither in strife nor play: suppose that one of

the hearers of Parmenides was asked, 'To what is the term "notbeing" to be applied?'do you know what

sort of object he would single out in reply, and what answer he would make to the enquirer?

THEAETETUS: That is a difficult question, and one not to be answered at all by a person like myself.

STRANGER: There is at any rate no difficulty in seeing that the predicate 'notbeing' is not applicable to

STRANGER: It is also plain, that in speaking of something we speak of being, for to speak of an abstract

STRANGER: You mean by assenting to imply that he who says something must say some one thing?

STRANGER: Some in the singular (ti) you would say is the sign of one, some in the dual (tine) of two, some

STRANGER: And as we cannot admit that a man speaks and says nothing, he who says 'notbeing' does not

STRANGER: Not yet, my friend, is the time for such a word; for there still remains of all perplexities the

STRANGER: Then we must not attempt to attribute to notbeing number either in the singular or plural?

STRANGER: But how can a man either express in words or even conceive in thought things which are not

STRANGER: When we speak of things which are not, are we not attributing plurality to notbeing?

STRANGER: But, on the other hand, when we say 'what is not,' do we not attribute unity?

STRANGER: Nevertheless, we maintain that you may not and ought not to attribute being to notbeing?

STRANGER: Do you see, then, that notbeing in itself can neither be spoken, uttered, or thought, but that it

STRANGER: But, if so, I was wrong in telling you just now that the difficulty which was coming is the

STRANGER: Well, I am surprised, after what has been said already, that you do not see the difficulty in

which he who would refute the notion of not being is involved. For he is compelled to contradict himself as

STRANGER: Do not expect clearness from me. For I, who maintain that not being has no part either in the

one or many, just now spoke and am still speaking of notbeing as one; for I say 'notbeing.' Do you

STRANGER: And a little while ago I said that notbeing is unutterable, unspeakable, indescribable: do you

STRANGER: When I introduced the word 'is,' did I not contradict what I said before?

STRANGER: And when I spoke of notbeing as indescribable and unspeakable and unutterable, in using

STRANGER: And yet we say that, strictly speaking, it should not be defined as one or many, and should not

STRANGER: How, then, can any one put any faith in me? For now, as always, I am unequal to the

refutation of notbeing. And therefore, as I was saying, do not look to me for the right way of speaking about

STRANGER: Make a noble effort, as becomes youth, and endeavour with all your might to speak of

notbeing in a right manner, without introducing into it either existence or unity or plurality.

THEAETETUS: It would be a strange boldness in me which would attempt the task when I see you thus

STRANGER: Say no more of ourselves; but until we find some one or other who can speak of notbeing

without number, we must acknowledge that the Sophist is a clever rogue who will not be got out of his hole.

STRANGER: And if we say to him that he professes an art of making appearances, he will grapple with us

and retort our argument upon ourselves; and when we call him an imagemaker he will say, 'Pray what do

you mean at all by an image?'and I should like to know, Theaetetus, how we can possibly answer the

THEAETETUS: We shall doubtless tell him of the images which are reflected in water or in mirrors; also of

STRANGER: I see, Theaetetus, that you have never made the acquaintance of the Sophist.

STRANGER: When you tell him of something existing in a mirror, or in sculpture, and address him as

though he had eyes, he will laugh you to scorn, and will pretend that he knows nothing of mirrors and

STRANGER: The common notion pervading all these objects, which you speak of as many, and yet call by

the single name of image, as though it were the unity under which they were all included. How will you

THEAETETUS: How, Stranger, can I describe an image except as something fashioned in the likeness of

STRANGER: And do you mean this something to be some other true thing, or what do you mean?

THEAETETUS: In what a strange complication of being and notbeing we are involved!

STRANGER: Strange! I should think so. See how, by his reciprocation of opposites, the manyheaded

Sophist has compelled us, quite against our will, to admit the existence of notbeing.

STRANGER: The difficulty is how to define his art without falling into a contradiction.

STRANGER: When we say that he deceives us with an illusion, and that his art is illusory, do we mean that

STRANGER: Again, false opinion is that form of opinion which thinks the opposite of the truth:You

STRANGER: Does false opinion think that things which are not are not, or that in a certain sense they are?

THEAETETUS: Things that are not must be imagined to exist in a certain sense, if any degree of falsehood

STRANGER: And does not false opinion also think that things which most certainly exist do not exist at all?

STRANGER: And in like manner, a false proposition will be deemed to be one which asserts the

STRANGER: There is not; but the Sophist will deny these statements. And indeed how can any rational man

assent to them, when the very expressions which we have just used were before acknowledged by us to be

unutterable, unspeakable, indescribable, unthinkable? Do you see his point, Theaetetus?

THEAETETUS: Of course he will say that we are contradicting ourselves when we hazard the assertion,

that falsehood exists in opinion and in words; for in maintaining this, we are compelled over and over again

to assert being of notbeing, which we admitted just now to be an utter impossibility.

STRANGER: How well you remember! And now it is high time to hold a consultation as to what we ought

to do about the Sophist; for if we persist in looking for him in the class of false workers and magicians, you

see that the handles for objection and the difficulties which will arise are very numerous and obvious.

STRANGER: We have gone through but a very small portion of them, and they are really infinite.

THEAETETUS: Certainly not, I should say, if we can get the slightest hold upon him.

STRANGER: Will you then forgive me, and, as your words imply, not be altogether displeased if I flinch a

STRANGER: Because, in selfdefence, I must test the philosophy of my father Parmenides, and try to prove

by main force that in a certain sense notbeing is, and that being, on the other hand, is not.

STRANGER: Yes, a blind man, as they say, might see that, and, unless these questions are decided in one

way or another, no one when he speaks of false words, or false opinion, or idols, or images, or imitations, or

appearances, or about the arts which are concerned with them; can avoid falling into ridiculous

STRANGER: And therefore I must venture to lay hands on my father's argument; for if I am to be

STRANGER: You heard me say what I have always felt and still feelthat I have no heart for this

STRANGER: I tremble at the thought of what I have said, and expect that you will deem me mad, when you

hear of my sudden changes and shiftings; let me therefore observe, that I am examining the question entirely

THEAETETUS: There is no reason for you to fear that I shall impute any impropriety to you, if you attempt

STRANGER: And where shall I begin the perilous enterprise? I think that the road which I must take is

STRANGER: I think that we had better, first of all, consider the points which at present are regarded as

selfevident, lest we may have fallen into some confusion, and be too ready to assent to one another,

STRANGER: I think that Parmenides, and all ever yet undertook to determine the number and nature of

STRANGER: As if we had been children, to whom they repeated each his own mythus or story;one said

that there were three principles, and that at one time there was war between certain of them; and then again

there was peace, and they were married and begat children, and brought them up; and another spoke of two

principles,a moist and a dry, or a hot and a cold, and made them marry and cohabit. The Eleatics, however,

in our part of the world, say that all things are many in name, but in nature one; this is their mythus, which

goes back to Xenophanes, and is even older. Then there are Ionian, and in more recent times Sicilian muses,

who have arrived at the conclusion that to unite the two principles is safer, and to say that being is one and

many, and that these are held together by enmity and friendship, ever parting, ever meeting, as the severer

Muses assert, while the gentler ones do not insist on the perpetual strife and peace, but admit a relaxation and

alternation of them; peace and unity sometimes prevailing under the sway of Aphrodite, and then again

plurality and war, by reason of a principle of strife. Whether any of them spoke the truth in all this is hard to

determine; besides, antiquity and famous men should have reverence, and not be liable to accusations so

STRANGER: That they went on their several ways disdaining to notice people like ourselves; they did not

STRANGER: I mean to say, that when they talk of one, two, or more elements, which are or have become or

are becoming, or again of heat mingling with cold, assuming in some other part of their works separations

and mixtures,tell me, Theaetetus, do you understand what they mean by these expressions? When I was a

younger man, I used to fancy that I understood quite well what was meant by the term 'notbeing,' which is

STRANGER: And very likely we have been getting into the same perplexity about 'being,' and yet may

fancy that when anybody utters the word, we understand him quite easily, although we do not know about

STRANGER: The consideration of most of them may be deferred; but we had better now discuss the chief

THEAETETUS: Of what are you speaking? You clearly think that we must first investigate what people

STRANGER: You follow close at my heels, Theaetetus. For the right method, I conceive, will be to call into

our presence the dualistic philosophers and to interrogate them. 'Come,' we will say, 'Ye, who affirm that hot

and cold or any other two principles are the universe, what is this term which you apply to both of them, and

what do you mean when you say that both and each of them "are"? How are we to understand the word "are"?

Upon your view, are we to suppose that there is a third principle over and above the other two,three in all,

and not two? For clearly you cannot say that one of the two principles is being, and yet attribute being equally

to both of them; for, if you did, whichever of the two is identified with being, will comprehend the other; and

STRANGER: But perhaps you mean to give the name of 'being' to both of them together?

STRANGER: 'Then, friends,' we shall reply to them, 'the answer is plainly that the two will still be resolved

STRANGER: 'Since, then, we are in a difficulty, please to tell us what you mean, when you speak of being;

for there can be no doubt that you always from the first understood your own meaning, whereas we once

thought that we understood you, but now we are in a great strait. Please to begin by explaining this matter to

us, and let us no longer fancy that we understand you, when we entirely misunderstand you.' There will be no

impropriety in our demanding an answer to this question, either of the dualists or of the pluralists?

STRANGER: And what about the assertors of the oneness of the allmust we not endeavour to ascertain

STRANGER: Then let them answer this question: One, you say, alone is? 'Yes,' they will reply.

STRANGER: And is being the same as one, and do you apply two names to the same thing?

STRANGER: It is clear, Theaetetus, that he who asserts the unity of being will find a difficulty in answering

STRANGER: To admit of two names, and to affirm that there is nothing but unity, is surely ridiculous?

STRANGER: And yet he who identifies the name with the thing will be compelled to say that it is the name

of nothing, or if he says that it is the name of something, even then the name will only be the name of a name,

STRANGER: And the one will turn out to be only one of one, and being absolute unity, will represent a

STRANGER: And would they say that the whole is other than the one that is, or the same with it?

'Every way like unto the fullness of a wellrounded sphere, Evenly balanced from the centre on every side,

And must needs be neither greater nor less in any way, Neither on this side nor on that'

STRANGER: Yet that which has parts may have the attribute of unity in all the parts, and in this way being

STRANGER: Because, according to right reason, that which is truly one must be affirmed to be absolutely

STRANGER: But this indivisible, if made up of many parts, will contradict reason.

STRANGER: Shall we say that being is one and a whole, because it has the attribute of unity? Or shall we

STRANGER: Most true; for being, having in a certain sense the attribute of one, is yet proved not to be the

STRANGER: And yet if being be not a whole, through having the attribute of unity, and there be such a

STRANGER: Upon this view, again, being, having a defect of being, will become notbeing?

STRANGER: And, again, the all becomes more than one, for being and the whole will each have their

STRANGER: But if the whole does not exist at all, all the previous difficulties remain the same, and there

will be the further difficulty, that besides having no being, being can never have come into being.

STRANGER: Because that which comes into being always comes into being as a whole, so that he who does

not give whole a place among beings, cannot speak either of essence or generation as existing.

STRANGER: Again; how can that which is not a whole have any quantity? For that which is of a certain

STRANGER: And there will be innumerable other points, each of them causing infinite trouble to him who

THEAETETUS: The difficulties which are dawning upon us prove this; for one objection connects with

another, and they are always involving what has preceded in a greater and worse perplexity.

STRANGER: We are far from having exhausted the more exact thinkers who treat of being and notbeing.

But let us be content to leave them, and proceed to view those who speak less precisely; and we shall find as

the result of all, that the nature of being is quite as difficult to comprehend as that of notbeing.

STRANGER: There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are

STRANGER: Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and

they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the

things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as

one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of

STRANGER: And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of

an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas;

the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits

by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies,

Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.

STRANGER: Let us ask each party in turn, to give an account of that which they call essence.

STRANGER: With those who make being to consist in ideas, there will be less difficulty, for they are civil

people enough; but there will be very great difficulty, or rather an absolute impossibility, in getting an

opinion out of those who drag everything down to matter. Shall I tell you what we must do?

STRANGER: Let us, if we can, really improve them; but if this is not possible, let us imagine them to be

better than they are, and more willing to answer in accordance with the rules of argument, and then their

opinion will be more worth having; for that which better men acknowledge has more weight than that which

is acknowledged by inferior men. Moreover we are no respecters of persons, but seekers after truth.

STRANGER: Then now, on the supposition that they are improved, let us ask them to state their views, and

STRANGER: Let them say whether they would admit that there is such a thing as a mortal animal.

STRANGER: And do they not say that one soul is just, and another unjust, and that one soul is wise, and

STRANGER: And that the just and wise soul becomes just and wise by the possession of justice and

STRANGER: But surely that which may be present or may be absent will be admitted by them to exist?

STRANGER: And, allowing that justice, wisdom, the other virtues, and their opposites exist, as well as a

soul in which they inhere, do they affirm any of them to be visible and tangible, or are they all invisible?

THEAETETUS: They would distinguish: the soul would be said by them to have a body; but as to the other

qualities of justice, wisdom, and the like, about which you asked, they would not venture either to deny their

STRANGER: Verily, Theaetetus, I perceive a great improvement in them; the real aborigines, children of

the dragon's teeth, would have been deterred by no shame at all, but would have obstinately asserted that

STRANGER: Let us push the question; for if they will admit that any, even the smallest particle of being, is

incorporeal, it is enough; they must then say what that nature is which is common to both the corporeal and

incorporeal, and which they have in their mind's eye when they say of both of them that they 'are.' Perhaps

they may be in a difficulty; and if this is the case, there is a possibility that they may accept a notion of ours

STRANGER: My notion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to

be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect,

THEAETETUS: They accept your suggestion, having nothing better of their own to offer.

STRANGER: Very good; perhaps we, as well as they, may one day change our minds; but, for the present,

STRANGER: Let us now go to the friends of ideas; of their opinions, too, you shall be the interpreter.

STRANGER: And you would allow that we participate in generation with the body, and through perception,

but we participate with the soul through thought in true essence; and essence you would affirm to be always

STRANGER: Well, fair sirs, we say to them, what is this participation, which you assert of both? Do you

STRANGER: We said that being was an active or passive energy, arising out of a certain power which

proceeds from elements meeting with one another. Perhaps your ears, Theaetetus, may fail to catch their

STRANGER: They deny the truth of what we were just now saying to the aborigines about existence.

STRANGER: Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was held by us to be a sufficient

STRANGER: They deny this, and say that the power of doing or suffering is confined to becoming, and that

STRANGER: Yes; but our reply will be, that we want to ascertain from them more distinctly, whether they

STRANGER: And is knowing and being known doing or suffering, or both, or is the one doing and the other

THEAETETUS: Clearly, neither has any share in either; for if they say anything else, they will contradict

STRANGER: I understand; but they will allow that if to know is active, then, of course, to be known is

passive. And on this view being, in so far as it is known, is acted upon by knowledge, and is therefore in

motion; for that which is in a state of rest cannot be acted upon, as we affirm.

STRANGER: And, O heavens, can we ever be made to believe that motion and life and soul and mind are

not present with perfect being? Can we imagine that being is devoid of life and mind, and exists in awful

STRANGER: Or shall we say that both inhere in perfect being, but that it has no soul which contains them?

STRANGER: Or that being has mind and life and soul, but although endowed with soul remains absolutely

STRANGER: Then, Theaetetus, our inference is, that if there is no motion, neither is there any mind

STRANGER: And yet this equally follows, if we grant that all things are in motionupon this view too

STRANGER: Do you think that sameness of condition and mode and subject could ever exist without a

STRANGER: Can you see how without them mind could exist, or come into existence anywhere?

STRANGER: And surely contend we must in every possible way against him who would annihilate

knowledge and reason and mind, and yet ventures to speak confidently about anything.

STRANGER: Then the philosopher, who has the truest reverence for these qualities, cannot possibly accept

the notion of those who say that the whole is at rest, either as unity or in many forms: and he will be utterly

deaf to those who assert universal motion. As children say entreatingly 'Give us both,' so he will include both

STRANGER: Alas, Theaetetus, methinks that we are now only beginning to see the real difficulty of the

STRANGER: O my friend, do you not see that nothing can exceed our ignorance, and yet we fancy that we

THEAETETUS: I certainly thought that we were; and I do not at all understand how we never found out our

STRANGER: Reflect: after having made these admissions, may we not be justly asked the same questions

STRANGER: To be sure I will, and I will remind you of them, by putting the same questions to you which I

STRANGER: Would you not say that rest and motion are in the most entire opposition to one another?

STRANGER: And when you admit that both or either of them are, do you mean to say that both or either of

STRANGER: Or do you wish to imply that they are both at rest, when you say that they are?

STRANGER: Then you conceive of being as some third and distinct nature, under which rest and motion are

alike included; and, observing that they both participate in being, you declare that they are.

THEAETETUS: Truly we seem to have an intimation that being is some third thing, when we say that rest

STRANGER: Then being is not the combination of rest and motion, but something different from them.

STRANGER: Being, then, according to its own nature, is neither in motion nor at rest.

STRANGER: Where, then, is a man to look for help who would have any clear or fixed notion of being in

STRANGER: I scarcely think that he can look anywhere; for that which is not in motion must be at rest, and

again, that which is not at rest must be in motion; but being is placed outside of both these classes. Is this

STRANGER: When we were asked to what we were to assign the appellation of notbeing, we were in the

THEAETETUS: I should say, Stranger, that we are in one which is, if possible, even greater.

STRANGER: Then let us acknowledge the difficulty; and as being and not being are involved in the same

perplexity, there is hope that when the one appears more or less distinctly, the other will equally appear; and

if we are able to see neither, there may still be a chance of steering our way in between them, without any

STRANGER: Let us enquire, then, how we come to predicate many names of the same thing.

STRANGER: I mean that we speak of man, for example, under many namesthat we attribute to him

colours and forms and magnitudes and virtues and vices, in all of which instances and in ten thousand others

we not only speak of him as a man, but also as good, and having numberless other attributes, and in the same

way anything else which we originally supposed to be one is described by us as many, and under many

STRANGER: And thus we provide a rich feast for tyros, whether young or old; for there is nothing easier

than to argue that the one cannot be many, or the many one; and great is their delight in denying that a man is

good; for man, they insist, is man and good is good. I dare say that you have met with persons who take an

interest in such mattersthey are often elderly men, whose meagre sense is thrown into amazement by these

STRANGER: Then, not to exclude any one who has ever speculated at all upon the nature of being, let us

STRANGER: Shall we refuse to attribute being to motion and rest, or anything to anything, and assume that

they do not mingle, and are incapable of participating in one another? Or shall we gather all into one class of

things communicable with one another? Or are some things communicable and others not?Which of these

THEAETETUS: I have nothing to answer on their behalf. Suppose that you take all these hypotheses in

STRANGER: Very good, and first let us assume them to say that nothing is capable of participating in

anything else in any respect; in that case rest and motion cannot participate in being at all.

STRANGER: Then by this admission everything is instantly overturned, as well the doctrine of universal

motion as of universal rest, and also the doctrine of those who distribute being into immutable and everlasting

kinds; for all these add on a notion of being, some affirming that things 'are' truly in motion, and others that

STRANGER: Again, those who would at one time compound, and at another resolve all things, whether

making them into one and out of one creating infinity, or dividing them into finite elements, and forming

compounds out of these; whether they suppose the processes of creation to be successive or continuous,

STRANGER: Most ridiculous of all will the men themselves be who want to carry out the argument and yet

forbid us to call anything, because participating in some affection from another, by the name of that other.

STRANGER: Why, because they are compelled to use the words 'to be,' 'apart,' 'from others,' 'in itself,' and

ten thousand more, which they cannot give up, but must make the connecting links of discourse; and

therefore they do not require to be refuted by others, but their enemy, as the saying is, inhabits the same

house with them; they are always carrying about with them an adversary, like the wonderful ventriloquist,

STRANGER: And now, if we suppose that all things have the power of communion with one

THEAETETUS: Why, because motion itself would be at rest, and rest again in motion, if they could be

STRANGER: For, surely, either all things have communion with all; or nothing with any other thing; or

STRANGER: And two out of these three suppositions have been found to be impossible.

STRANGER: Every one then, who desires to answer truly, will adopt the third and remaining hypothesis of

STRANGER: This communion of some with some may be illustrated by the case of letters; for some letters

STRANGER: And the vowels, especially, are a sort of bond which pervades all the other letters, so that

STRANGER: But does every one know what letters will unite with what? Or is art required in order to do

STRANGER: And is not this also true of sounds high and low?Is not he who has the art to know what

STRANGER: And we shall find this to be generally true of art or the absence of art.

STRANGER: And as classes are admitted by us in like manner to be some of them capable and others

incapable of intermixture, must not he who would rightly show what kinds will unite and what will not,

proceed by the help of science in the path of argument? And will he not ask if the connecting links are

universal, and so capable of intermixture with all things; and again, in divisions, whether there are not other

THEAETETUS: To be sure he will require science, and, if I am not mistaken, the very greatest of all

STRANGER: How are we to call it? By Zeus, have we not lighted unwittingly upon our free and noble

science, and in looking for the Sophist have we not entertained the philosopher unawares?

STRANGER: Should we not say that the division according to classes, which neither makes the same other,

STRANGER: Then, surely, he who can divide rightly is able to see clearly one form pervading a scattered

multitude, and many different forms contained under one higher form; and again, one form knit together into

a single whole and pervading many such wholes, and many forms, existing only in separation and isolation.

This is the knowledge of classes which determines where they can have communion with one another and

STRANGER: And the art of dialectic would be attributed by you only to the philosopher pure and true?

STRANGER: In this region we shall always discover the philosopher, if we look for him; like the Sophist,

STRANGER: Because the Sophist runs away into the darkness of notbeing, in which he has learned by

habit to feel about, and cannot be discovered because of the darkness of the place. Is not that true?

STRANGER: And the philosopher, always holding converse through reason with the idea of being, is also

dark from excess of light; for the souls of the many have no eye which can endure the vision of the divine.

STRANGER: Well, the philosopher may hereafter be more fully considered by us, if we are disposed; but

the Sophist must clearly not be allowed to escape until we have had a good look at him.

STRANGER: Since, then, we are agreed that some classes have a communion with one another, and others

not, and some have communion with a few and others with many, and that there is no reason why some

should not have universal communion with all, let us now pursue the enquiry, as the argument suggests, not

in relation to all ideas, lest the multitude of them should confuse us, but let us select a few of those which are

reckoned to be the principal ones, and consider their several natures and their capacity of communion with

one another, in order that if we are not able to apprehend with perfect clearness the notions of being and

notbeing, we may at least not fall short in the consideration of them, so far as they come within the scope of

the present enquiry, if peradventure we may be allowed to assert the reality of notbeing, and yet escape

STRANGER: The most important of all the genera are those which we were just now mentioningbeing

STRANGER: And two of these are, as we affirm, incapable of communion with one another.

STRANGER: Whereas being surely has communion with both of them, for both of them are?

STRANGER: And each of them is other than the remaining two, but the same with itself.

STRANGER: But then, what is the meaning of these two words, 'same' and 'other'? Are they two new kinds

other than the three, and yet always of necessity intermingling with them, and are we to have five kinds

instead of three; or when we speak of the same and other, are we unconsciously speaking of one of the three

STRANGER: Whatever we attribute to motion and rest in common, cannot be either of them.

STRANGER: Because motion would be at rest and rest in motion, for either of them, being predicated of

both, will compel the other to change into the opposite of its own nature, because partaking of its opposite.

STRANGER: Then we must not assert that motion, any more than rest, is either the same or the other.

STRANGER: But if they are identical, then again in saying that motion and rest have being, we should also

STRANGER: Then we may suppose the same to be a fourth class, which is now to be added to the three

STRANGER: And shall we call the other a fifth class? Or should we consider being and other to be two

STRANGER: But you would agree, if I am not mistaken, that existences are relative as well as absolute?

STRANGER: But this would not be the case unless being and the other entirely differed; for, if the other,

like being, were absolute as well as relative, then there would have been a kind of other which was not other

than other. And now we find that what is other must of necessity be what it is in relation to some other.

STRANGER: And the fifth class pervades all classes, for they all differ from one another, not by reason of

STRANGER: First there is motion, which we affirm to be absolutely 'other' than rest: what else can we say?

STRANGER: Yet, surely, motion is the same, because all things partake of the same.

STRANGER: Then we must admit, and not object to say, that motion is the same and is not the same, for we

do not apply the terms 'same' and 'not the same,' in the same sense; but we call it the 'same,' in relation to

itself, because partaking of the same; and not the same, because having communion with the other, it is

thereby severed from the same, and has become not that but other, and is therefore rightly spoken of as 'not

STRANGER: And if absolute motion in any point of view partook of rest, there would be no absurdity in

THEAETETUS: Quite right,that is, on the supposition that some classes mingle with one another, and

STRANGER: That such a communion of kinds is according to nature, we had already proved before we

STRANGER: Let us proceed, then. May we not say that motion is other than the other, having been also

STRANGER: What is the next step? Shall we say that motion is other than the three and not other than the

fourth,for we agreed that there are five classes about and in the sphere of which we proposed to make

THEAETETUS: Surely we cannot admit that the number is less than it appeared to be just now.

STRANGER: The plain result is that motion, since it partakes of being, really is and also is not?

STRANGER: Then notbeing necessarily exists in the case of motion and of every class; for the nature of

the other entering into them all, makes each of them other than being, and so nonexistent; and therefore of

all of them, in like manner, we may truly say that they are not; and again, inasmuch as they partake of being,

STRANGER: Then we may infer that being is not, in respect of as many other things as there are; for

notbeing these it is itself one, and is not the other things, which are infinite in number.

STRANGER: And we must not quarrel with this result, since it is of the nature of classes to have

communion with one another; and if any one denies our present statement [viz., that being is not, etc.], let

him first argue with our former conclusion [i.e., respecting the communion of ideas], and then he may

STRANGER: When we speak of notbeing, we speak, I suppose, not of something opposed to being, but

STRANGER: When we speak of something as not great, does the expression seem to you to imply what is

STRANGER: The negative particles, ou and me, when prefixed to words, do not imply opposition, but only

difference from the words, or more correctly from the things represented by the words, which follow them.

STRANGER: The nature of the other appears to me to be divided into fractions like knowledge.

STRANGER: Knowledge, like the other, is one; and yet the various parts of knowledge have each of them

their own particular name, and hence there are many arts and kinds of knowledge.

STRANGER: And is not the case the same with the parts of the other, which is also one?

THEAETETUS: It has; for whatever we call notbeautiful is other than the beautiful, not than something

STRANGER: Is the notbeautiful anything but thisan existence parted off from a certain kind of

existence, and again from another point of view opposed to an existing something?

STRANGER: Then the notbeautiful turns out to be the opposition of being to being?

STRANGER: But upon this view, is the beautiful a more real and the not beautiful a less real existence?

STRANGER: And, in the same way, the just must be placed in the same category with the notjustthe

STRANGER: The same may be said of other things; seeing that the nature of the other has a real existence,

STRANGER: Then, as would appear, the opposition of a part of the other, and of a part of being, to one

another, is, if I may venture to say so, as truly essence as being itself, and implies not the opposite of being,

THEAETETUS: Clearly, notbeing; and this is the very nature for which the Sophist compelled us to

STRANGER: And has not this, as you were saying, as real an existence as any other class? May I not say

with confidence that notbeing has an assured existence, and a nature of its own? Just as the great was found

to be great and the beautiful beautiful, and the notgreat notgreat, and the notbeautiful notbeautiful, in

the same manner notbeing has been found to be and is notbeing, and is to be reckoned one among the

STRANGER: Do you observe that our scepticism has carried us beyond the range of Parmenides'

STRANGER: We have advanced to a further point, and shown him more than he forbad us to investigate.

STRANGER: Whereas, we have not only proved that things which are not are, but we have shown what

form of being notbeing is; for we have shown that the nature of the other is, and is distributed over all things

in their relations to one another, and whatever part of the other is contrasted with being, this is precisely what

STRANGER: Let not any one say, then, that while affirming the opposition of notbeing to being, we still

assert the being of notbeing; for as to whether there is an opposite of being, to that enquiry we have long

said goodbyeit may or may not be, and may or may not be capable of definition. But as touching our

present account of notbeing, let a man either convince us of error, or, so long as he cannot, he too must say,

as we are saying, that there is a communion of classes, and that being, and difference or other, traverse all

things and mutually interpenetrate, so that the other partakes of being, and by reason of this participation is,

and yet is not that of which it partakes, but other, and being other than being, it is clearly a necessity that

notbeing should be. And again, being, through partaking of the other, becomes a class other than the

remaining classes, and being other than all of them, is not each one of them, and is not all the rest, so that

undoubtedly there are thousands upon thousands of cases in which being is not, and all other things, whether

regarded individually or collectively, in many respects are, and in many respects are not.

STRANGER: And he who is sceptical of this contradiction, must think how he can find something better to

say; or if he sees a puzzle, and his pleasure is to drag words this way and that, the argument will prove to

him, that he is not making a worthy use of his faculties; for there is no charm in such puzzles, and there is no

difficulty in detecting them; but we can tell him of something else the pursuit of which is noble and also

STRANGER: A thing of which I have already spoken;letting alone these puzzles as involving no

difficulty, he should be able to follow and criticize in detail every argument, and when a man says that the

same is in a manner other, or that other is the same, to understand and refute him from his own point of view,

and in the same respect in which he asserts either of these affections. But to show that somehow and in some

sense the same is other, or the other same, or the great small, or the like unlike; and to delight in always

bringing forward such contradictions, is no real refutation, but is clearly the newborn babe of some one who

STRANGER: For certainly, my friend, the attempt to separate all existences from one another is a barbarism

STRANGER: The attempt at universal separation is the final annihilation of all reasoning; for only by the

STRANGER: And, observe that we were only just in time in making a resistance to such separatists, and

STRANGER: Why, that we might be able to assert discourse to be a kind of being; for if we could not, the

worst of all consequences would follow; we should have no philosophy. Moreover, the necessity for

determining the nature of discourse presses upon us at this moment; if utterly deprived of it, we could no

more hold discourse; and deprived of it we should be if we admitted that there was no admixture of natures at

THEAETETUS: Very true. But I do not understand why at this moment we must determine the nature of

STRANGER: Perhaps you will see more clearly by the help of the following explanation.

STRANGER: Notbeing has been acknowledged by us to be one among many classes diffused over all

STRANGER: And thence arises the question, whether notbeing mingles with opinion and language.

STRANGER: If notbeing has no part in the proposition, then all things must be true; but if notbeing has a

part, then false opinion and false speech are possible, for to think or to say what is notis falsehood, which

STRANGER: And if there is deceit, then all things must be full of idols and images and fancies.

STRANGER: Into that region the Sophist, as we said, made his escape, and, when he had got there, denied

the very possibility of falsehood; no one, he argued, either conceived or uttered falsehood, inasmuch as

STRANGER: And now, notbeing has been shown to partake of being, and therefore he will not continue

fighting in this direction, but he will probably say that some ideas partake of notbeing, and some not, and

that language and opinion are of the nonpartaking class; and he will still fight to the death against the

existence of the imagemaking and phantastic art, in which we have placed him, because, as he will say,

opinion and language do not partake of notbeing, and unless this participation exists, there can be no such

thing as falsehood. And, with the view of meeting this evasion, we must begin by enquiring into the nature of

language, opinion, and imagination, in order that when we find them we may find also that they have

communion with notbeing, and, having made out the connexion of them, may thus prove that falsehood

exists; and therein we will imprison the Sophist, if he deserves it, or, if not, we will let him go again and look

THEAETETUS: Certainly, Stranger, there appears to be truth in what was said about the Sophist at first,

that he was of a class not easily caught, for he seems to have abundance of defences, which he throws up, and

which must every one of them be stormed before we can reach the man himself. And even now, we have with

difficulty got through his first defence, which is the notbeing of notbeing, and lo! here is another; for we

have still to show that falsehood exists in the sphere of language and opinion, and there will be another and

STRANGER: Any one, Theaetetus, who is able to advance even a little ought to be of good cheer, for what

would he who is dispirited at a little progress do, if he were making none at all, or even undergoing a repulse?

Such a faint heart, as the proverb says, will never take a city: but now that we have succeeded thus far, the

STRANGER: Then, as I was saying, let us first of all obtain a conception of language and opinion, in order

that we may have clearer grounds for determining, whether notbeing has any concern with them, or whether

STRANGER: Then, now, let us speak of names, as before we were speaking of ideas and letters; for that is

STRANGER: The question at issue is whether all names may be connected with one another, or none, or

STRANGER: I understand you to say that words which have a meaning when in sequence may be

connected, but that words which have no meaning when in sequence cannot be connected?

STRANGER: What I thought that you intended when you gave your assent; for there are two sorts of

STRANGER: And the other, which is an articulate mark set on those who do the actions, we call a noun.

STRANGER: A succession of nouns only is not a sentence, any more than of verbs without nouns.

STRANGER: I see that when you gave your assent you had something else in your mind. But what I

intended to say was, that a mere succession of nouns or of verbs is not discourse.

STRANGER: I mean that words like 'walks,' 'runs,' 'sleeps,' or any other words which denote action,

STRANGER: Or, again, when you say 'lion,' 'stag,' 'horse,' or any other words which denote agentsneither

in this way of stringing words together do you attain to discourse; for there is no expression of action or

inaction, or of the existence of existence or nonexistence indicated by the sounds, until verbs are mingled

with nouns; then the words fit, and the smallest combination of them forms language, and is the simplest and

STRANGER: When any one says 'A man learns,' should you not call this the simplest and least of

STRANGER: Yes, for he now arrives at the point of giving an intimation about something which is, or is

becoming, or has become, or will be. And he not only names, but he does something, by connecting verbs

with nouns; and therefore we say that he discourses, and to this connexion of words we give the name of

STRANGER: And as there are some things which fit one another, and other things which do not fit, so there

are some vocal signs which do, and others which do not, combine and form discourse.

STRANGER: I will repeat a sentence to you in which a thing and an action are combined, by the help of a

STRANGER: Of whom does the sentence speak, and who is the subject? that is what you have to tell.

THEAETETUS: That also is a sentence which will be admitted by every one to speak of me, and to apply to

STRANGER: We agreed that every sentence must necessarily have a certain quality.

STRANGER: And say that things are real of you which are not; for, as we were saying, in regard to each

STRANGER: The second of the two sentences which related to you was first of all an example of the

STRANGER: And it would be no sentence at all if there were no subject, for, as we proved, a sentence

STRANGER: When other, then, is asserted of you as the same, and notbeing as being, such a combination

STRANGER: And therefore thought, opinion, and imagination are now proved to exist in our minds both as

STRANGER: You will know better if you first gain a knowledge of what they are, and in what they

STRANGER: Are not thought and speech the same, with this exception, that what is called thought is the

STRANGER: But the stream of thought which flows through the lips and is audible is called speech?

STRANGER: When the affirmation or denial takes Place in silence and in the mind only, have you any other

STRANGER: And when opinion is presented, not simply, but in some form of sense, would you not call it

STRANGER: And seeing that language is true and false, and that thought is the conversation of the soul

with herself, and opinion is the end of thinking, and imagination or phantasy is the union of sense and

opinion, the inference is that some of them, since they are akin to language, should have an element of

STRANGER: Do you perceive, then, that false opinion and speech have been discovered sooner than we

expected?For just now we seemed to be undertaking a task which would never be accomplished.

STRANGER: Then let us not be discouraged about the future; but now having made this discovery, let us go

STRANGER: We divided imagemaking into two sorts; the one likenessmaking, the other imaginative or

STRANGER: And we said that we were uncertain in which we should place the Sophist.

STRANGER: And our heads began to go round more and more when it was asserted that there is no such

thing as an image or idol or appearance, because in no manner or time or place can there ever be such a thing

STRANGER: And now, since there has been shown to be false speech and false opinion, there may be

imitations of real existences, and out of this condition of the mind an art of deception may arise.

STRANGER: And we have already admitted, in what preceded, that the Sophist was lurking in one of the

STRANGER: Let us, then, renew the attempt, and in dividing any class, always take the part to the right,

holding fast to that which holds the Sophist, until we have stripped him of all his common properties, and

reached his difference or peculiar. Then we may exhibit him in his true nature, first to ourselves and then to

STRANGER: You may remember that all art was originally divided by us into creative and acquisitive.

STRANGER: And the Sophist was flitting before us in the acquisitive class, in the subdivisions of hunting,

STRANGER: But now that the imitative art has enclosed him, it is clear that we must begin by dividing the

art of creation; for imitation is a kind of creationof images, however, as we affirm, and not of real things.

STRANGER: Every power, as you may remember our saying originally, which causes things to exist, not

STRANGER: Looking, now, at the world and all the animals and plants, at things which grow upon the

earth from seeds and roots, as well as at inanimate substances which are formed within the earth, fusile or

non fusile, shall we say that they come into existencenot having existed previouslyby the creation of

STRANGER: The opinion that nature brings them into being from some spontaneous and unintelligent

cause. Or shall we say that they are created by a divine reason and a knowledge which comes from God?

THEAETETUS: I dare say that, owing to my youth, I may often waver in my view, but now when I look at

STRANGER: Nobly said, Theaetetus, and if I thought that you were one of those who would hereafter

change your mind, I would have gently argued with you, and forced you to assent; but as I perceive that you

will come of yourself and without any argument of mine, to that belief which, as you say, attracts you, I will

not forestall the work of time. Let me suppose, then, that things which are said to be made by nature are the

work of divine art, and that things which are made by man out of these are works of human art. And so there

STRANGER: I mean to say that you should make a vertical division of production or invention, as you have

STRANGER: Then, now, there are in all four parts or segmentstwo of them have reference to us and are

STRANGER: And, again, in the division which was supposed to be made in the other way, one part in each

subdivision is the making of the things themselves, but the two remaining parts may be called the making of

STRANGER: I suppose that we, and the other animals, and the elements out of which things are

madefire, water, and the likeare known by us to be each and all the creation and work of God.

STRANGER: And there are images of them, which are not them, but which correspond to them; and these

STRANGER: The appearances which spring up of themselves in sleep or by day, such as a shadow when

darkness arises in a fire, or the reflection which is produced when the light in bright and smooth objects

meets on their surface with an external light, and creates a perception the opposite of our ordinary sight.

THEAETETUS: Yes; and the images as well as the creation are equally the work of a divine hand.

STRANGER: And what shall we say of human art? Do we not make one house by the art of building, and

another by the art of drawing, which is a sort of dream created by man for those who are awake?

STRANGER: And other products of human creation are also twofold and go in pairs; there is the thing, with

which the art of making the thing is concerned, and the image, with which imitation is concerned.

THEAETETUS: Now I begin to understand, and am ready to acknowledge that there are two kinds of

production, and each of them twofold; in the lateral division there is both a divine and a human production; in

STRANGER: And let us not forget that of the imitative class the one part was to have been

likenessmaking, and the other phantastic, if it could be shown that falsehood is a reality and belongs to the

STRANGER: And this appeared to be the case; and therefore now, without hesitation, we shall number the

STRANGER: There is one kind which is produced by an instrument, and another in which the creator of the

STRANGER: When any one makes himself appear like another in his figure or his voice, imitation is the

STRANGER: Let this, then, be named the art of mimicry, and this the province assigned to it; as for the

other division, we are weary and will give that up, leaving to some one else the duty of making the class and

STRANGER: There is a further distinction, Theaetetus, which is worthy of our consideration, and for a

STRANGER: There are some who imitate, knowing what they imitate, and some who do not know. And

what line of distinction can there possibly be greater than that which divides ignorance from knowledge?

STRANGER: Was not the sort of imitation of which we spoke just now the imitation of those who know?

STRANGER: And what would you say of the figure or form of justice or of virtue in general? Are we not

well aware that many, having no knowledge of either, but only a sort of opinion, do their best to show that

this opinion is really entertained by them, by expressing it, as far as they can, in word and deed?

STRANGER: And do they always fail in their attempt to be thought just, when they are not? Or is not the

STRANGER: Such a one, then, should be described as an imitatorto be distinguished from the other, as

STRANGER: Can we find a suitable name for each of them? This is clearly not an easy task; for among the

ancients there was some confusion of ideas, which prevented them from attempting to divide genera into

species; wherefore there is no great abundance of names. Yet, for the sake of distinctness, I will make bold to

call the imitation which coexists with opinion, the imitation of appearancethat which coexists with science,

STRANGER: The former is our present concern, for the Sophist was classed with imitators indeed, but not

STRANGER: Let us, then, examine our imitator of appearance, and see whether he is sound, like a piece of

STRANGER: Indeed there is a very considerable crack; for if you look, you find that one of the two classes

of imitators is a simple creature, who thinks that he knows that which he only fancies; the other sort has

knocked about among arguments, until he suspects and fears that he is ignorant of that which to the many he

STRANGER: Shall we regard one as the simple imitatorthe other as the dissembling or ironical imitator?

STRANGER: And shall we further speak of this latter class as having one or two divisions?

STRANGER: Upon consideration, then, there appear to me to be two; there is the dissembler, who

harangues a multitude in public in a long speech, and the dissembler, who in private and in short speeches

STRANGER: And who is the maker of the longer speeches? Is he the statesman or the popular orator?

STRANGER: And what shall we call the other? Is he the philosopher or the Sophist?

THEAETETUS: The philosopher he cannot be, for upon our view he is ignorant; but since he is an imitator

of the wise he will have a name which is formed by an adaptation of the word sophos. What shall we name

him? I am pretty sure that I cannot be mistaken in terming him the true and very Sophist.

STRANGER: Shall we bind up his name as we did before, making a chain from one end of his genealogy to

STRANGER: He, then, who traces the pedigree of his art as followswho, belonging to the conscious or

dissembling section of the art of causing selfcontradiction, is an imitator of appearance, and is separated

from the class of phantastic which is a branch of imagemaking into that further division of creation, the

juggling of words, a creation human, and not divineany one who affirms the real Sophist to be of this