wants to impress upon us the importance of classification; neither
neglecting the many individuals, nor attempting to count them all, but
finding the genera and species under which they naturally fall. Here,
then, and in the parallel passages of the Phaedrus and of the Sophist, is
found the germ of the most fruitful notion of modern science.

Plato describes with ludicrous exaggeration the influence exerted by the
one and many on the minds of young men in their first fervour of
metaphysical enthusiasm (compare Republic). But they are none the less an
everlasting quality of reason or reasoning which never grows old in us. At
first we have but a confused conception of them, analogous to the eyes
blinking at the light in the Republic. To this Plato opposes the
revelation from Heaven of the real relations of them, which some
Prometheus, who gave the true fire from heaven, is supposed to have
imparted to us. Plato is speaking of two things--(1) the crude notion of
the one and many, which powerfully affects the ordinary mind when first
beginning to think; (2) the same notion when cleared up by the help of
dialectic.

To us the problem of the one and many has lost its chief interest and
perplexity. We readily acknowledge that a whole has many parts, that the
continuous is also the divisible, that in all objects of sense there is a
one and many, and that a like principle may be applied to analogy to purely
intellectual conceptions. If we attend to the meaning of the words, we are
compelled to admit that two contradictory statements are true. But the
antinomy is so familiar as to be scarcely observed by us. Our sense of the
contradiction, like Plato's, only begins in a higher sphere, when we speak
of necessity and free-will, of mind and body, of Three Persons and One
Substance, and the like. The world of knowledge is always dividing more
and more; every truth is at first the enemy of every other truth. Yet