body is one, but has many members, be any longer a stumbling-block.

Plato's difficulty seems to begin in the region of ideas. He cannot
understand how an absolute unity, such as the Eleatic Being, can be broken
up into a number of individuals, or be in and out of them at once.
Philosophy had so deepened or intensified the nature of one or Being, by
the thoughts of successive generations, that the mind could no longer
imagine 'Being' as in a state of change or division. To say that the verb
of existence is the copula, or that unity is a mere unit, is to us easy;
but to the Greek in a particular stage of thought such an analysis involved
the same kind of difficulty as the conception of God existing both in and
out of the world would to ourselves. Nor was he assisted by the analogy of
sensible objects. The sphere of mind was dark and mysterious to him; but
instead of being illustrated by sense, the greatest light appeared to be
thrown on the nature of ideas when they were contrasted with sense.

Both here and in the Parmenides, where similar difficulties are raised,
Plato seems prepared to desert his ancient ground. He cannot tell the
relation in which abstract ideas stand to one another, and therefore he
transfers the one and many out of his transcendental world, and proceeds to
lay down practical rules for their application to different branches of
knowledge. As in the Republic he supposes the philosopher to proceed by
regular steps, until he arrives at the idea of good; as in the Sophist and
Politicus he insists that in dividing the whole into its parts we should
bisect in the middle in the hope of finding species; as in the Phaedrus
(see above) he would have 'no limb broken' of the organism of knowledge;--
so in the Philebus he urges the necessity of filling up all the
intermediate links which occur (compare Bacon's 'media axiomata') in the
passage from unity to infinity. With him the idea of science may be said
to anticipate science; at a time when the sciences were not yet divided, he