been discovered something which we
call opinion?

There has.

Then what remains to be discovered is the object which partakes equally
of the nature of being and not-being, and cannot rightly be termed
either, pure and simple; this unknown term, when discovered, we may
truly call the subject of opinion, and assign each to their proper
faculty,--the extremes to the faculties of the extremes and the mean to
the faculty of the mean.

True.

This being premised, I would ask the gentleman who is of opinion that
there is no absolute or unchangeable idea of beauty--in whose opinion
the beautiful is the manifold--he, I say, your lover of beautiful
sights, who cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and the
just is one, or that anything is one--to him I would appeal, saying,
Will you be so very kind, sir, as to tell us whether, of all these
beautiful things, there is one which will not be found ugly; or of the
just, which will not be found unjust; or of the holy, which will not
also be unholy?

No, he replied; the beautiful will in some point of view be found ugly;
and the same is true of the rest.

And may not the many which are doubles be also halves?--doubles, that
is, of one thing, and halves of another?

Quite true.

And things great and small, heavy and light, as they are termed, will
not be denoted by these any more than by the opposite names?

True; both these and the opposite names will always attach to all of
them.

And can any one of those many things which are called by particular
names be said to be this rather than not to be this?

He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts
or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with
what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat
was sitting. The individual objects of which I am speaking are also
a riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind,
either as being or not-being, or both, or neither.

Then what will you do with them? I said. Can they have a better place
than between being and not-being? For they are clearly not in greater
darkness or negation than not-being, or more full of light and existence
than being.

That is quite true, he said.

Thus then we seem to have discovered that the many ideas which the
multitude entertain about the beautiful and about all other things are
tossing about in some region which is half-way between pure being and
pure not-bei