being the

/ contradictious
/ dissembling
/ without knowledge
/ human and not divine
/ juggling with words
/ phantastic or unreal
/ art of image-making.

...

In commenting on the dialogue in which Plato most nearly approaches the
great modern master of metaphysics there are several points which
it will be useful to consider, such as the unity of opposites, the
conception of the ideas as causes, and the relation of the Platonic and
Hegelian dialectic.

The unity of opposites was the crux of ancient thinkers in the age of
Plato: How could one thing be or become another? That substances have
attributes was implied in common language; that heat and cold, day and
night, pass into one another was a matter of experience 'on a level with
the cobbler's understanding' (Theat.). But how could philosophy explain
the connexion of ideas, how justify the passing of them into one
another? The abstractions of one, other, being, not-being, rest, motion,
individual, universal, which successive generations of philosophers had
recently discovered, seemed to be beyond the reach of human thought,
like stars shining in a distant heaven. They were the symbols of
different schools of philosophy: but in what relation did they stand to
one another and to the world of sense? It was hardly conceivable
that one could be other, or the same different. Yet without some
reconciliation of these elementary ideas thought was impossible. There
was no distinction between truth and falsehood, between the Sophist
and the philosopher. Everything could be predicated of everything,
or nothing of anything. To these difficulties Plato finds what to us
appears to be the answer of common sense--that Not-being is the relative
or other of Being, the defining and distinguishing principle, and that
some ideas combine with others, but not all with all. It is remarkable
however that he offers this obvious reply only as the result of a long
and tedious enquiry; by a great effort he is able to look down as 'from
a height' on the 'friends of the ideas' as well as on the pre-Socratic
philosophies. Yet he is merely asserting principles which no one who
could be made to understand them would deny.

The Platonic unity of differences or opposites is the beginning of the
modern view that all knowledge is of relations; it also anticipates the
doctrine of Spinoza that all determination is negation. Plato takes or
gives so much of either o