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Or, again, if likeness is or is not, what will be the consequences in either of these cases to the subjects of the hypothesis, and to other things, in relation both to themselves and to one another, and so of unlikeness; and the same holds good of motion and rest, of generation and destruction, and even of being and not-being.
And, as knowledge corresponded to being and ignorance of necessity to not-being, for that intermediate between being and not-being there has to be discovered a corresponding intermediate between ignorance and knowledge, if there be such? Certainly. Do we admit the existence of opinion? Undoubtedly. As being the same with knowledge, or another faculty? Another faculty.
The processes by which Parmenides obtains his remarkable results may be summed up as follows: Compound or correlative ideas which involve each other, such as, being and not-being, one and many, are conceived sometimes in a state of composition, and sometimes of division: The division or distinction is sometimes heightened into total opposition, e.g. between one and same, one and other: or The idea, which has been already divided, is regarded, like a number, as capable of further infinite subdivision: The argument often proceeds 'a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter' and conversely: The analogy of opposites is misused by him; he argues indiscriminately sometimes from what is like, sometimes from what is unlike in them: The idea of being or not-being is identified with existence or non-existence in place or time: The same ideas are regarded sometimes as in process of transition, sometimes as alternatives or opposites: There are no degrees or kinds of sameness, likeness, difference, nor any adequate conception of motion or change: One, being, time, like space in Zeno's puzzle of Achilles and the tortoise, are regarded sometimes as continuous and sometimes as discrete: In some parts of the argument the abstraction is so rarefied as to become not only fallacious, but almost unintelligible, e.g. in the contradiction which is elicited out of the relative terms older and younger: The relation between two terms is regarded under contradictory aspects, as for example when the existence of the one and the non-existence of the one are equally assumed to involve the existence of the many: Words are used through long chains of argument, sometimes loosely, sometimes with the precision of numbers or of geometrical figures.
But we can hardly suppose that Plato would have preferred the study of nature to man, or that he would have deemed the formation of the world and the human frame to have the same interest which he ascribes to the mystery of being and not-being, or to the great political problems which he discusses in the Republic and the Laws.
Then if being is the subject-matter of knowledge, something else must be the subject-matter of opinion? Yes, something else. Well then, is not-being the subject-matter of opinion? or, rather, how can there be an opinion at all about not-being? Reflect: when a man has an opinion, has he not an opinion about something? Can he have an opinion which is an opinion about nothing? Impossible.
Suddenly feeling came back to me feeling in the shape of overwhelming terror; such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can describe, a passionate resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were there other souls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness? or was I indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being into something that was neither being nor not-being?
The fate gleams transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal, unthinkable not-being. And this our life, this admixture of labour and of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is steaming up to the changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is the eternal issue.
For the disdain of metaphysics for all reality that endures comes precisely from this, that it reaches being only by passing through "not-being," and that an existence which endures seems to it not strong enough to conquer non-existence and itself posit itself.
He says of those who accept the data of experience as miracles: Foolish and ignorant they, and do not reach far with their thinking, Who suppose that what has not existed can come into being, Or that something may die away wholly and vanish completely; Impossible is it that any beginning can come from Not-Being, Quite impossible also that being can fade into nothing; For wherever a being is driven, there will it continue to be.
Then everything which is and is not in a certain state, implies change? Certainly. And change is motion we may say that? Yes, motion. And the one has been proved both to be and not to be? Yes. And therefore is and is not in the same state? Yes. Thus the one that is not has been shown to have motion also, because it changes from being to not-being? That appears to be true.
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