common intelligence.

But this ever-growing 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 difficulty about
Not-being.

The answer is, that in these and all other determinations of any notion we
are attributing to it 'Not-being.' We went in search of Not-being and
seemed to lose Being, and now in the hunt after Being we recover both.
Not-being is a kind of Being, and in a sense co-extensive with Being. And
there are as many divisions of Not-being as of Being. To every positive
idea--'just,' 'beautiful,' and the like, there is a corresponding negative
idea--'not-just,' 'not-beautiful,' and the like.

A doubt may be raised whether this account of the negative is really the
true one. The common logicians would say that the 'not-just,' '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 'not-just' in or about the
same class in which we might expect to find the 'just.' 'Not-just 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.