g in conceiving all philosophy under the form
of opposites. The first abstraction is to him the beginning of thought.
Hitherto there had only existed a tumultuous chaos of mythological
fancy, but when Thales said 'All is water' a new era began to dawn upon
the world. Man was seeking to grasp the universe under a single form
which was at first simply a material element, the most equable and
colourless and universal which could be found. But soon the human mind
became dissatisfied with the emblem, and after ringing the changes
on one element after another, demanded a more abstract and perfect
conception, such as one or Being, which was absolutely at rest. But the
positive had its negative, the conception of Being involved Not-being,
the conception of one, many, the conception of a whole, parts. Then the
pendulum swung to the other side, from rest to motion, from Xenophanes
to Heracleitus. The opposition of Being and Not-being projected into
space became the atoms and void of Leucippus and Democritus. Until
the Atomists, the abstraction of the individual did not exist; in the
philosophy of Anaxagoras the idea of mind, whether human or divine,
was beginning to be realized. The pendulum gave another swing, from the
individual to the universal, from the object to the subject. The
Sophist first uttered the word 'Man is the measure of all things,' which
Socrates presented in a new form as the study of ethics. Once more we
return from mind to the object of mind, which is knowledge, and out
of knowledge the various degrees or kinds of knowledge more or less
abstract were gradually developed. The threefold division of logic,
physic, and ethics, foreshadowed in Plato, was finally established by
Aristotle and the Stoics. Thus, according to Hegel, in the course of
about two centuries by a process of antagonism and negation the leading
thoughts of philosophy were evolved.

There is nothing like this progress of opposites in Plato, who in the
Symposium denies the possibility of reconciliation until the opposition
has passed away. In his own words, there is an absurdity in supposing
that 'harmony is discord; for in reality harmony consists of notes of a
higher and lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by
the art of music' (Symp.). He does indeed describe objects of sense
as regarded by us sometimes from one point of view and sometimes from
another. As he says at the end of the Fifth Book of the Republic, 'There
is not