Our doctrine (says the Platonic Socrates in the Philebus) is, that one and the same thing (the one common notion, namely, embodied in one general term) which--hypo logôn +--under the influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language, become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to everything of which existence is asserted from time to time. This law neither will cease to be, nor has it just now begun; but something of the kind is, I think, an eternal and ineradicable affection of our reason itself in us. And whenever a young man gets his first taste of this he is delighted as having found the priceless pearl of philosophy; he becomes an enthusiast in his delight; and eagerly sets in motion-- kinei + --every definition [154] --logos+--every conception or mental definition (it looked so fixed and firm till then!) at one time winding things round each other and welding them into one (that is, he drops all particulari- ties out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular, till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first, and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him, older or younger, or of whatever age he may be; sparing neither father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen; scarcely even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men; for he would hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find an interpreter. Philebus, 15.+ The Platonic doctrine of "the Many and the One"--the problem with which we are brought face to face in this choice specimen of the humour as well as of the metaphysical power of Plato--is not precisely the question with which the speculative young man of our own day is likely to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese; though the questions we are apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment, or protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeit-geist and its doings, may, in their turn, come to seem quite as lifeless and unendurable. As the theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes the mere commonplace of the next, so, in matters of philosophic enquiry, it might appear that the all-absorbing novelty of one generation becomes nothing less than the standard of what is uninteresting, as such, to its successor. Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is not so much [155] what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after all really tells. Plato and Platonism we shall never understand unless we are patient with him in what he has to tell us about "the Many and the One."