Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/28

 12 A. E. TAYLOR : ascribe to the Eeal from one state or quality to its opposite cannot be spread over an actual duration, for then the same object would possess opposite qualities during the same piece of duration, and this is for the Plato of the Parmenides, as for the Plato of the Eepublic (436 B), a manifest impossi- bility. We are thus compelled to think of the transition as taking place in an unextended moment ; there will be, so to speak, a point of indifference midway between motion and rest which occupies no duration (eV pov ov&evi ovcra), and it will be at this zero-point where the motion e.g. is over and the rest not yet begun that the transition takes place. And we may apply the same idea to all the forms of change which we have recognised as predicates of the real. In each case the change must be thought of as involving such a moment of transition at which the object is between two states, one of which is over and the other not yet begun. We may therefore add to the list of contradictions in which we have involved the one reality this further one, that while it possesses in succession all manner of conflicting predicates at the moment of transition from one to another it possesses neither (157 B). Thus the hypothesis ends at least formally by bringing the novel conception of the "Instantaneous" to bear on the problem of unity and diversity. But it is clear that for Plato's purpose, which is to prove that the various pairs of predicates enumerated can be denied as well as affirmed of the One, there was no necessity for an elaborate investigation into the metaphysics of change. It would have been quite enough in each case to go, as he does in the case of unity and diversity at 155 E, straight from the affirma- tion under certain conditions of both sides of a contradiction to the denial under proper restrictions of each. So that, as I said before, the appearance of this hypothesis is best explained by the assumption that Plato wished to illustrate a conception w r hich he felt to be at once novel and impor- tant, even at the cost of a conscious digression. But the most important peculiarity of this hypothesis, from our point of view, is its distinct assertion that the only way in which contradictory predicates, such as those with which we have been dealing in the last hypothesis, can alike attach to reality is the way of succession in time. Our natural in- clination was to see in the contradictions of that argument at the least an adumbration of that modern theory which makes contradiction and strife, in a deeper sense than that of Heracleitus, the heart of reality. We are here, however, unmistakably taught that Plato advocates such a union of opposites as is from the Hegelian point of view merely