the conception of Being involved Not-being, the conception of one, many,
the conception of a whole, parts. Then the pendulum swung to the other
side, from rest to motion, from Xenophanes to Heracleitus. The opposition
of Being and Not-being projected into space became the atoms and void of
Leucippus and Democritus. Until the Atomists, the abstraction of the
individual did not exist; in the philosophy of Anaxagoras the idea of mind,
whether human or divine, was beginning to be realized. The pendulum gave
another swing, from the individual to the universal, from the object to the
subject. The Sophist first uttered the word 'Man is the measure of all
things,' which Socrates presented in a new form as the study of ethics.
Once more we return from mind to the object of mind, which is knowledge,
and out of knowledge the various degrees or kinds of knowledge more or less
abstract were gradually developed. The threefold division of logic,
physic, and ethics, foreshadowed in Plato, was finally established by
Aristotle and the Stoics. Thus, according to Hegel, in the course of about
two centuries by a process of antagonism and negation the leading thoughts
of philosophy were evolved.

There is nothing like this progress of opposites in Plato, who in the
Symposium denies the possibility of reconciliation until the opposition has
passed away. In his own words, there is an absurdity in supposing that
'harmony is discord; for in reality harmony consists of notes of a higher
and lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of
music' (Symp.). He does indeed describe objects of sense as regarded by us
sometimes from one point of view and sometimes from another. As he says at
the end of the Fifth Book of the Republic, 'There is nothing light which is
not heavy, or great which is not small.' And he extends this relativity to
the conceptions of just and good, as well as to great and small. In like
manner he acknowledges that the same number may be more or less in relation
to other numbers without any increase or diminution (Theat.). But the