22 A. E. TAYLOR : become unmeaning, but we are led directly to that severance of the real from the actual and apparent, with the evil fruits of which the present dialogue has made us sufficiently familiar. It is certain that reality, as it comes to us in perception at any moment, is not full and ultimate reality, and thus if whatever has any element of negation and unre- ality about it must be nothing, the whole sensible world at once disappears. The same is true of the world of Ideal Forms : for one " Idea " is not another ; thus it is not the whole of reality, and therefore from this point of view is not real at all. It is from such difficulties as these that Plato's doctrine of fjn'] oi> as here set forth delivers us, by resolving negation into difference, and so preparing the way for two conceptions of the utmost philosophic importance : (1) the conception of reality as possessing various grades or degrees which is made so prominent in the Republic and Philebus, 1 (2) the true conception of error and falsehood, not as the assertion of the absolutely non-existent and unmeaning, but as a confusion of different kinds of reality. (Falsitas in absoluta privatione consistere nequit . . . neque etiam in absoluta ignorantia. Spinoza, Ethica, ii., 35.) Of the meaning of the various predicates which are now successively asserted and denied of the " non-existent " One I have said all that I think necessary in connexion with the parallel demonstration of hypothesis 2, and shall not there- fore repeat what I have there observed. I have also pointed out in the same place the mistakes which beset the argument : (1) the treatment of a relation between two terms as a mere adjective qualifying one of them, and (2) the inference from the absence of " equality " between two things to the pre- sence of other quantitative relations or vice versa. The logical character of this last confusion is made more apparent in the present passage by the introduction of a fresh step in the reasoning. At 150 D we went directly from the absence of "greatness" and "smallness" to the presence of "equality," and we were content to note that there was a logical blunder of some kind involved in the process without stopping to specify it. Here in 161 CD the nature of the fallacy is made manifest by the interpolation into the corresponding reverse argument of an "Idea of inequality" (dvia-oTijTos TO ei/), and it is now clear that, unless everything 1 Whatever be the date of the Parmenides and Sophistes, the conception of not-being here set forth must have been clearly present to Plato's mind when he wrote Rep., 583-586, where the distinction of degrees in reality plays so important a part.
