ON THE INTERPRETATION OF PLATO'S PARMENIDES. 17 and unknowability, necessarily consigns the latter to the same outer darkness. Hypothesis 5 (159 B-160 B). We now take up the prin- ciple of hypothesis 1, and apply it to the consideration of the manifold, with the same consequences which there attended its application to the One. Once more we make, not the reality, but the merely self-identical character of these determinations our starting-point. Unity we are to take as unity, and never as plurality ; plurality as plurality, and never as unity. From this basis our argument will pro- ceed, as follows. To begin with, we must affirm the absolute severance (j^wpi^, Socrates' old watch-word) of the One and the Manifold. For of each we can say that it is not the other, while the two taken together make up the totality of thinkable existence. There can be no third nature which falls neither under the head of the One nor under the head of What is other than the One in which both might inhere as predicates of the same subject, no neutral ground on which they might meet on terms of mutual forbearance (159 c). Still less can either appear in the domain of the other. For the absolute One, being One and nothing but One, can have no parts. The Manifold is therefore neither one as a whole for that would be to identify what has j.ust been pronounced absolutely different nor is it made up of parts which are unities for that is to subdivide and multiply what is, ex hypothesi, one and invisible. There is thus no conceivable sense in which unity can be predicated of the manifold ; it can be neither a single unit nor a collec- tion of units. And therefore it is not even a plurality, for every plurality is a sum of units. Nor is it only quantitative predicates whicb are excluded from ra aa by this con- clusion. It is ultimately impossible to predicate anything whatever of the Manifold. For if any one universal predicate can be affirmed of them they have so far just that unity and stability which we have refused to ascribe to them ; and if both sides of a contradiction be asserted of them (notice ei&r) with reference to ideas of relation at 159 E) they have it twice over. Thus neither side of any of the antitheses can be predicated, whether positively or negatively, of the Many. The Many because they have no unity, like the One because it has nothing else, are the merely non- existent and unknowable, and Plato is warranted in con- cluding (IGOfi) with a sentence which incorporates the result of hypothesis 1 with that at which we have just arrived. If unity be incompatible with other predicates, then " the One is at once everything and nothing, and the same is true of 2
