we argue
from isolated passages in his writings, or attempt to draw what appear
to us to be the natural inferences from them, we are full of perplexity.
There is a similar confusion about necessity and free-will, and about
the state of the soul after death. Also he sometimes supposes that God
is immanent in the world, sometimes that he is transcendent. And having
no distinction of objective and subjective, he passes imperceptibly
from one to the other; from intelligence to soul, from eternity to time.
These contradictions may be softened or concealed by a judicious use
of language, but they cannot be wholly got rid of. That an age of
intellectual transition must also be one of inconsistency; that the
creative is opposed to the critical or defining habit of mind or time,
has been often repeated by us. But, as Plato would say, 'there is no
harm in repeating twice or thrice' (Laws) what is important for the
understanding of a great author.

It has not, however, been observed, that the confusion partly arises out
of the elements of opposing philosophies which are preserved in him. He
holds these in solution, he brings them into relation with one another,
but he does not perfectly harmonize them. They are part of his own mind,
and he is incapable of placing himself outside of them and criticizing
them. They grow as he grows; they are a kind of composition with which
his own philosophy is overlaid. In early life he fancies that he
has mastered them: but he is also mastered by them; and in language
(Sophist) which may be compared with the hesitating tone of the Timaeus,
he confesses in his later years that they are full of obscurity to him.
He attributes new meanings to the words of Parmenides and Heracleitus;
but at times the old Eleatic philosophy appears to go beyond him; then
the world of phenomena disappears, but the doctrine of ideas is also
reduced to nothingness. All of them are nearer to one another than they
themselves supposed, and nearer to him than he supposed. All of them are
antagonistic to sense and have an affinity to number and measure and a
presentiment of ideas. Even in Plato they still retain their contentious
or controversial character, which was developed by the growth of
dialectic. He is never able to reconcile the first causes of the
pre-Socratic philosophers with the final causes of Socrates himself.
There is no intelligible account of the relation of numbers to the
universal ideas, or of universals