A History of Greek Philosophy / PLATO

Page 27

The ideas whereof the ‘Other’ (or, as he again calls it, the ‘Great and Small’ or ‘More and Less,’ meaning that which is unnamable, or wholly neutral in character, and which may therefore be represented equally by contradictory attributes) by participation becomes a resemblance, Plato compared to the ‘Numbers’ of the Pythagoreans. Hence, Aristotle remarks (Met. A. 6), Plato found in the ideas the originative or formative Cause of things, that which made them what they were or could be called,—their Essence; in the ‘Great and Small’ he found the opposite principle or Matter (Raw Material) of things.

In this way the antithesis of Mind and Matter, whether on the great scale in creation or on the small in rational perception, is not an antithesis of unrelated opposition. Each is correlative of the other, so to speak as the male and the female; the one is generative, formative, active, positive; the other is capable of being impregnated, receptive, passive, negative; but neither can realise itself apart from the other.

This relation of ‘Being’ with that which is ‘Other than Being’ is Creation, wherein we can conceive of the world as coming to be, yet not in Time. And in the same way Plato speaks of a third form, besides the Idea and that which receives it, namely, ‘Formless Space, the mother of all things.’ As Kant might have formulated it, Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable.

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