10 A. E. TAYLOR : content a mere footnote to the foregoing antithesis is in form treated as an independent hypothesis, and the dialogue is made richer by a valuable piece of analysis at the expense of its artistic and logical unity. The point from which we now start for the third time is the conclusion reached by our last discussion. We are to consider certain further consequences of the doctrine we have been led to affirm about the One. We have seen that it both is and is not one and many ; we have now to ask in what precise way we are to understand this rather enigmatic result. The negative part of the premise from which we set out is, it should be remarked, merely an extension and restatement of the positive ; it has nothing to do with the negative conclusions of 1 which were ex- pressly rejected by Plato at 142 A. The non-existence of unity which is here assumed is not the absolute non- existence of the first hypothesis, but only such relative non-existence as is involved in the result that the One is also a plurality. The following reasoning, about the meta- physical assumptions of which it is certainly possible to feel some misgiving, has at any rate the merit of making it clearer than ever that Plato does not conceive his union of contraries in an Hegelian sense. For he goes on to argue that if the One is both a unity and a plurality, and if, as has been already admitted, it appears in time, then the two sides of it, the unity and the plurality, will fall temporally apart. The One " partakes of reality " he argues in so far as it is, and is one ; it " partakes of unreality " in so far as it is many, or as the Many are real. It is therefore evi- dent that the two phases of its existence are distinct in time. "It is real at one time and unreal at another, for that is the only way in which it can be both real and unreal " (ev d(o apa xp6v<a /iere^et ical ev aa) ov //.ere^ei KT). And consequently there must come moments in its history at which it is passing through the transition from unity to plurality, from actual reality to such unreality as is implied in the reality of the many. That is, it undergoes the process of coming into and passing out of being (yevecns and (j>0opa). The same considerations will apply to each of those pairs of contradictory predicates which we have seen reason to ascribe alike to the one reality. Its appearances as qualified by each of these opposites will fall into successive portions of time, and there will thus be moments at which the One will be undergoing all the different forms of change enumer- ated by Aristotle ; it will pass through " expansion " and " contraction," " assimilation " and " dissimilation," " in-
