on,' and the like.

The Sophist, like the Phaedrus, has a double character, and unites two
enquirers, which are only in a somewhat forced manner connected with
each other. The first is the search after the Sophist, the second is the
enquiry into the nature of Not-being, which occupies the middle part of
the work. For 'Not-being' is the hole or division of the dialectical
net in which the Sophist has hidden himself. He is the imaginary
impersonation of false opinion. Yet he denies the possibility of false
opinion; for falsehood is that which is not, and therefore has no
existence. At length the difficulty is solved; the answer, in
the language of the Republic, appears 'tumbling out at our feet.'
Acknowledging that there is a communion of kinds with kinds, and not
merely one Being or Good having different names, or several isolated
ideas or classes incapable of communion, we discover 'Not-being' to be
the other of 'Being.' Transferring this to language and thought, we have
no difficulty in apprehending that a proposition may be false as well
as true. The Sophist, drawn out of the shelter which Cynic and Megarian
paradoxes have temporarily afforded him, is proved to be a dissembler
and juggler with words.

The chief points of interest in the dialogue are: (I) the character
attributed to the Sophist: (II) the dialectical method: (III) the nature
of the puzzle about 'Not-being:' (IV) the battle of the philosophers:
(V) the relation of the Sophist to other dialogues.

I. The Sophist in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the
charlatan, the foreigner, the prince of esprits-faux, the hireling who
is not a teacher, and who, from whatever point of view he is regarded,
is the opposite of the true teacher. He is the 'evil one,' the ideal
representative of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and
intellectual tendencies of his own age; the adversary of the almost
equally ideal Socrates. He seems to be always growing in the fancy
of Plato, now boastful, now eristic, now clothing himself in rags of
philosophy, now more akin to the rhetorician or lawyer, now haranguing,
now questioning, until the final appearance in the Politicus of his
departing shadow in the disguise of a statesman. We are not to suppose
that Plato intended by such a description to depict Protagoras or
Gorgias, or even Thrasymachus, who all turn out to be 'very good sort
of people when we know them,' and all of them part on good terms with
Socrates. B