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Shall I begin with myself, and take my own hypothesis the one? and consider the consequences which follow on the supposition either of the being or of the not-being of one? By all means, said Zeno. And who will answer me? he said. Shall I propose the youngest? He will not make difficulties and will be the most likely to say what he thinks; and his answers will give me time to breathe.
The world of ordinary experience is not void, for a great number of statements can be made about it, but absolute truth is void, because nothing whatever can be predicated of it. Yet even this colourless designation is not perfectly accurate, because neither being nor not-being can be predicated of absolute truth.
Then the one which is not, if it is to maintain itself, must have the being of not-being as the bond of not-being, just as being must have as a bond the not-being of not-being in order to perfect its own being; for the truest assertion of the being of being and of the not-being of not-being is when being partakes of the being of being, and not of the being of not-being that is, the perfection of being; and when not-being does not partake of the not-being of not-being but of the being of not-being that is the perfection of not-being.
The same question is revived from the objective side in the Sophist: Being and Not-being are no longer exhibited in opposition, but are now reconciled; and the true nature of Not-being is discovered and made the basis of the correlation of ideas. Some links are probably missing which might have been supplied if we had trustworthy accounts of Plato's oral teaching.
Thus then we seem to have discovered that the many ideas which the multitude entertain about the beautiful and about all other things are tossing about in some region which is halfway between pure being and pure not-being? We have.
If things are resolved into the elements from which they came, then there will be others: else how did they come into being at all? If that-which-is is to depart into not-being, what prevents that happening to God himself? And it is equally impossible for that-which-is to come out of nothing and to depart into nothing.
He struck shrewdly at the root of them by placing the highest condition of man in the total extinguishment of desire. He then swept both matter and spirit into unreality by establishing the canon of ignorance, that the highest knowledge is to know that nothing is; that there is neither being nor not-being, nor yet the becoming.
One of the few things which our friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals honestly with his only history must be aware of an hour, almost a moment, of waning youth, when the vague potentiality of disbelief became a living doubt, thence-forward to abide with him till death resolve it. Endless not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after it endless being is unthinkable.
Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life passes away into this changeless radiance.
After all, eternal not-being and eternal being are the same. In the rosy snow that shone in heaven over a darkened earth was the ecstasy of consummation. Night and day are one, light and dark are one, both the same in the origin and in the issue, both the same in the moment, of ecstasy, light fused in darkness and darkness fused in light, as in the rosy snow above the twilight.
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