Sophist | Page 9

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--
os chi eteron men keuthe eni phresin, allo de eipe.
For their difficulty was not a practical but a metaphysical one; and their
conception of falsehood was really impaired and weakened by a

metaphysical illusion.
The strength of the illusion seems to lie in the alternative: If we once
admit the existence of Being and Not-being, as two spheres which
exclude each other, no Being or reality can be ascribed to Not-being,
and therefore not to falsehood, which is the image or expression of
Not-being. 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 predecessors--they are
still ends to him, and not mere instruments of thought. They are too
rough-hewn 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 negative.
The theory is, that Not-being is relation. Not-being 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 Not-being; 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 Not-being 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 Plato
arrived at his conception of Not-being.
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