earth-born giants, 'who grasped oaks and rocks in their hands,' and who
must be improved before they can be reasoned with; and the equally
humourous delineation of the friends of ideas, who defend themselves from a
fastness in the invisible world; or the comparison of the Sophist to a
painter or maker (compare Republic), and the hunt after him in the rich
meadow-lands of youth and wealth; or, again, the light and graceful touch
with which the older philosophies are painted ('Ionian and Sicilian
muses'), the comparison of them to mythological tales, and the fear of the
Eleatic that he will be counted a parricide if he ventures to lay hands on
his father Parmenides; or, once more, the likening of the Eleatic stranger
to a god from heaven.--All these passages, notwithstanding the decline of
the style, retain the impress of the great master of language. But the
equably diffused grace is gone; instead of the endless variety of the early
dialogues, traces of the rhythmical monotonous cadence of the Laws begin to
appear; and already an approach is made to the technical language of
Aristotle, in the frequent use of the words 'essence,' 'power,'
'generation,' 'motion,' 'rest,' 'action,' 'passion,' and the like.

The Sophist, like the Phaedrus, has a double character, and unites two
enquirers, which are only in a somewhat forced manner connected with each
other. The first is the search after the Sophist, the second is the
enquiry into the nature of Not-being, which occupies the middle part of the
work. For 'Not-being' is the hole or division of the dialectical net in
which the Sophist has hidden himself. He is the imaginary impersonation of
false opinion. Yet he denies the possibility of false opinion; for
falsehood is that which is not, and therefore has no existence. At length
the difficulty is solved; the answer, in the language of the Republic,
appears 'tumbling out at our feet.' Acknowledging that there is a
communion of kinds with kinds, and not merely one Being or Good having
different names, or several isolated ideas or classes incapable of