Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/523

 NOTE IN REPLY TO MB. A. W. BENN. 509 "unanimous tradition of Greek philosophy that like can only be known by like" implied forgetfulness of "the rival doctrine of perception by opposites hinted at by Heracleitus and worked out by Anaxagoras ". Mr. Benn concedes the point about Anaxagoras, which was what I was principally concerned to maintain, so that I might fairly claim to have been, by his own admission, justified in my criticism. He adds however (a) that perception is not knowledge, and (b) that a doctrine of perception by opposites is irreconcilable with the main principles of Heracleiteanism. To these arguments I would briefly reply (a) that if anything is cer- tain about the early physiologists, to whom both Mr. Benn's re- marks and my own criticisms had special reference, it is certain that they at any rate made no distinction between TO aio-Odvfo-OaL and TO povelv, and (b) that I neither asserted nor implied that the doctrine of ' perception by opposites ' is compatible with the general principles of Heracleiteanism. What I said was that the doctrine was ' hinted at ' by Heracleitus, and in saying so much I was thinking partly of the passage in Theophrastus De Sensibus, as Mr. Benn rightly conjectures, partly of the implication of such passages as Frag. 39, 60. I gather that Mr. Benn does not dispute the ac- curacy of my statement as far as it goes ; his further demonstra- tion, that I should have been guilty of an absurdity if I had gone on to say something else which I did not say (viz. that "perception by opposites" is compatible with Heracleiteanism as a whole), thus constitutes a mere ignoratio elenchi, and as for "Mr. Taylor's, theory of Heracleiteanism," Mr. Benn will see, if he will look at my article again, that it contains no theory of Heracleiteanism, good or bad. (3) We come next to the difficulty I raised about the reconcilia- tion of some remarks of Mr. Benn (op. cit. y p. 40, note 2) with Sophistes 245 d. And here I am afraid that each of us has mis- understood the other. At least I am sure Mr. Benn has strangely misunderstood me, and it also appears from his present explanation that I have misunderstood him. What I took Mr. Benn to mean by his footnote was that "all reality as such is necessarily im- perfect," a doctrine of Vacherot which he there quotes as "a remarkable parallel to his (i.e., Plato's) position ". Now I under- stood Mr. Benn here to mean by " reality," " actuality in the world of TO yiyi/d/Aevov " and by "perfection" metaphysical perfection, complete systematic structure. Accordingly I quoted in comment the statement of the Sophistes that "whatever is actual is actual as a whole " (yeyovev oJW), a proposition which I understand to imply that all actual existence partakes to some degree of meta- physical perfection, and to be quite inconsistent at any rate with the view that nothing actual is perfect and nothing perfect actual. In his reply Mr. Benn (a) mistranslates, as I believe, the passage in question. He renders ye'yovev oXov by 'exists wholly,' 'is in itself complete,' a tolerable version so far as the mere words go, and then proceeds to paraphrase this by "it either is or is not".