mind? and is not Being capable of being known? and, if this
is admitted, then capable of being affected or acted upon?--in motion,
then, and yet not wholly incapable of rest. Already we have been
compelled to attribute opposite determinations to Being. And the
answer to the difficulty about Being may be equally the answer to the
difficulty about Not-being.

The answer is, that in these and all other determinations of any notion
we are attributing to it 'Not-being.' We went in search of Not-being and
seemed to lose Being, and now in the hunt after Being we recover both.
Not-being is a kind of Being, and in a sense co-extensive with Being.
And there are as many divisions of Not-being as of Being. To
every positive idea--'just,' 'beautiful,' and the like, there is a
corresponding negative idea--'not-just,' 'not-beautiful,' and the like.

A doubt may be raised whether this account of the negative is really
the true one. The common logicians would say that the 'not-just,'
'not-beautiful,' are not really classes at all, but are merged in one
great class of the infinite or negative. The conception of Plato, in
the days before logic, seems to be more correct than this. For the word
'not' does not altogether annihilate the positive meaning of the word
'just': at least, it does not prevent our looking for the 'not-just'
in or about the same class in which we might expect to find the 'just.'
'Not-just is not-honourable' is neither a false nor an unmeaning
proposition. The reason is that the negative proposition has really
passed into an undefined positive. To say that 'not-just' has no more
meaning than 'not-honourable'--that is to say, that the two cannot in
any degree be distinguished, is clearly repugnant to the common use of
language.

The ordinary logic is also jealous of the explanation of negation as
relation, because seeming to take away the principle of contradiction.
Plato, as far as we know, is the first philosopher who distinctly
enunciated this principle; and though we need not suppose him to have
been always consistent with himself, there is no real inconsistency
between his explanation of the negative and the principle of
contradiction. Neither the Platonic notion of the negative as the
principle of difference, nor the Hegelian identity of Being and
Not-being, at all touch the principle of contradiction. For what is
asserted about Being and Not-Being only relates to our most abstract
notions, and in no way inter