mmanent; immanent in so far as they reside in the
things of sense, transcendent inasmuch as they have a reality of their
own apart from the objects of sense which participate in them. The
Idea of man would still be real even if all men were destroyed, and it
was real before any man existed, if there ever was such a time. For
the Ideas, being timeless, cannot be real now and not then.

Of what kinds of things are there Ideas? That there are moral Ideas,
such as Justice, Goodness, and Beauty, Ideas of corporeal things, such
as horse, man, tree, star, river, and Ideas of qualities, such as
whiteness, heaviness, {195} sweetness, we have already seen. But there
are Ideas not only of natural corporeal objects, but likewise of
manufactured articles; there are Ideas of beds, tables, clothes. And
there are Ideas not only of exalted moral entities, such as Beauty and
Justice. There are also the Ideal Ugliness, and the Ideal Injustice.
There are even Ideas of the positively nauseating, such as hair,
filth, and dirt. This is asserted in the "Parmenides." In that
dialogue Plato's teaching is put into the mouth of Parmenides. He
questions the young Socrates whether there are Ideas of hair, filth,
and dirt. Socrates denies that there can be Ideas of such base things.
But Parmenides corrects him, and tells him that, when he has attained
the highest philosophy, he will no longer despise such things.
Moreover, these Ideas of base things are just as much perfection in
their kind as Beauty and Goodness are in theirs. In general, the
principle is that there must be an Idea wherever a concept can be
formed; that is, wherever there is a class of many things called by
one name.

We saw, in treating of the Eleatics, that for them the absolute Being
contained no not-being, and the absolute One no multiplicity. And it
was just because they denied all not-being and multiplicity of the
absolute reality that they were unable to explain the world of
existence, and were forced to deny it altogether. The same problem
arises for Plato. Is Being absolutely excludent of not-being? Is the
Absolute an abstract One, utterly exclusive of the many? Is his
philosophy a pure monism? Is it a pluralism? Or is it a combination of
the two? These questions are discussed in the "Sophist" and the
"Parmenides."

{196}

Plato investigates the relations of the One and the many, Being and
not-being, quite in the abstract. He decides the principles involved,
and leave