Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/44

 28 A. E. TAYLOR : of the world is content to rest. The hypothesis is, in fact, perhaps the clearest account in the whole of the Platonic writings of that confused and unsj^stematised result of ex- perience which, taken at varying levels of reflexion, he opposes, under the names of Sofa and cua-Brja-is, to the co- herent understanding of the world as an ordered whole which alone he calls eirurr^iuri scientific knowledge. This confused " common -sense," we must remember, is some- thing very different from the error which results from the resolute adoption of an utterly perverted philosophical prin- ciple. It is all very well so far as it goes ; only the pity of it is that it doesn't go very far. Still of course it is not mere delusion or nonsense. For most men, and on some subjects, such as e.g. cosmology (Timceus, 28), even for the Platonic philosopher, it is the only available guide, and it would be folly to disregard it. We have seen (151 D) at the end of the second hypothesis that it is, in some degree, an apprehension of the one reality, but it is a most waver- ing and perplexed apprehension. It may be described in outline much as follows. AVe are to suppose ourselves face to face with a world of objects in which we have not learned as yet to detect the unity of plan or organisation. How will it appear to us? First of all, it will most certainly appear as a plurality, and as exhibiting diversity. But diversity from what ? Not from the ultimate unity, for that ex lujpothesi is not within the scope of our thinking (rov fiev yap ez^o? ovtc ecnai aa, fjirj OI/TO? 76, 164 c). The diversity will therefore be internal. Our world will seem to be a vast multitude of objects, each differing from all the others. And the same will be true if we analyse what seem to be its individual constituents. Each object, on closer inspection, will be found itself to consist of smaller parts, and these again of parts still smaller, and so on to infinity. Thus, in the absence of such a unity as is given to our apprehension of the different parts of a machine or an organism by their relation to the system of the whole, we shall have a world of countless different objects, each of which may if we chose to go no farther with our in- spection of it seem to be a unit, but must also, on close examination, confess itself an unlimited plurality, or, as Plato calls it, an cty/fo?, a mere indefinite " heap "- 1 And in the same way, these apparent units will seem to be capable of being numbered ; but it will be mere seeming, for there 1 Cf. for the happy use of the term Hume's " heap or collection of perceptions ".