Plato describes with ludicrous exaggeration the influence exerted by
the one and many on the minds of young men in their first fervour of
metaphysical enthusiasm (compare Republic). But they are none the less
an everlasting quality of reason or reasoning which never grows old in
us. At first we have but a confused conception of them, analogous to the
eyes blinking at the light in the Republic. To this Plato opposes
the revelation from Heaven of the real relations of them, which some
Prometheus, who gave the true fire from heaven, is supposed to have
imparted to us. Plato is speaking of two things--(1) the crude notion of
the one and many, which powerfully affects the ordinary mind when first
beginning to think; (2) the same notion when cleared up by the help of
dialectic.
To us the problem of the one and many has lost its chief interest and
perplexity. We readily acknowledge that a whole has many parts, that the
continuous is also the divisible, that in all objects of sense there is
a one and many, and that a like principle may be applied to analogy
to purely intellectual conceptions. If we attend to the meaning of the
words, we are compelled to admit that two contradictory statements are
true. But the antinomy is so familiar as to be scarcely observed by us.
Our sense of the contradiction, like Plato's, only begins in a higher
sphere, when we speak of necessity and free-will, of mind and body, of
Three Persons and One Substance, and the like. The world of knowledge
is always dividing more and more; every truth is at first the enemy of
every other truth. Yet without this division there can be no truth; nor
any complete truth without the reunion of the parts into a whole. And
hence the coexistence of opposites in the unity of the idea is regarded
by Hegel as the supreme principle of philosophy; and the law of
contradiction, which is affirmed by logicians to be an ultimate
principle of the human mind, is displaced by another law, which asserts
the coexistence of contradictories as imperfect and divided elements of
the truth. Without entering further into the depths of Hegelianism, we
may remark that this and all similar attempts to reconcile antinomies
have their origin in the old Platonic problem of the 'One and Many.'