Every several instance of 'The Many,' then--is it, more truly than it is not, that which one may affirm it to be? It is like people at supper-parties he said (very Attic supper- parties!) playing on words, and the children's riddle about the eunuch and his fling round the bat--with what, and on what, the riddle says he hit it; for these things also seem to set both ways, and it is not possible, fixedly, to conceive any one of them either to be, or not to be; neither both, nor the one, nor the other. Have you anything then you can do with them; or anywhere you can place them with fairer effect than in that position between being and the being not? For presumably they will not appear more obscure than what is not, so as not to be, still more; nor more luminous than what is, so as to be, even more than that. We have found then that the many customary notions of the many, about Beauty and the rest are revolved somewhere between not-being and being unmixedly. So we have. And agreed, at least, at the outset, that if anything of this sort presented itself, it must be declared matter not of knowledge, but of opinion; to be apprehended by the intermediate faculty; as it wanders unfixed, there, between. Republic, 478. [46] Many a train of thought, many a turn of expression, only too familiar, some may think, to the reader of Plato, are summarised in that troublesome yet perhaps attractive passage. The influence then of Parmenides on Plato had made him, incurably (shall we say?) a dualist. Only, practically, Plato's richly coloured genius will find a compromise between the One which alone really is, is yet so empty a thought for finite minds; and the Many, which most properly is not, yet presses so closely on eye and ear and heart and fancy and will, at every moment. That which really is (to on)+ the One, if he is really to think about it at all, must admit within it a certain variety of members; and, in effect, for Plato the true Being, the Absolute, the One, does become delightfully multiple, as the world of ideas-- appreciable, through years of loving study, more and more clearly, one by one, as the perfectly concrete, mutually adjusted, permanent forms of our veritable experience: the Bravery, for instance, that cannot be confused, not merely with Cowardice, but with Wisdom, or Humility. One after another they emerge again from the dead level, the Parmenidean tabula rasa, with nothing less than the reality of persons face to face with us, of a personal identity. It was as if the firm plastic outlines of the delightful old Greek polytheism had found their way back after all into a repellent monotheism. Prefer as he may in theory that [47] blank white light of the One--its sterile, "formless, colourless, impalpable," eternal identity with itself--the world, and this chiefly is why the world has not forgotten him, will be for him,