The Problem To‐Day

Extract

Philosophers, ancient as well as modern, Eastern as well as Western, have always been primarily concerned with the relation of the One and the Many. They have approached it from many angles and have treated it under different titles; Act and Potency, Form and Matter, Substance and Accidents, these fall within the perennial philosophy, but there are many other approaches. They are looking for the meaning of things; the meaning is one, the things are many. Even if the philosopher decides that there is no meaning and all is continuous, unrelated change, he has found a single frame, the One, for his whole experience of the Many. How can both have reality, the one being embracing all things? If the one being is the reality, then is not the multiplicity around us only apparent? If the things we look upon, daily astonished at their variety, are real, then is not the One into which we try to fit them merely a convenient fiction to satisfy the hunger of the enquiring mind?

Curiously, although philosophers have given themselves to this problem with a constant zeal, they have seldom found a stabilised view that could show them the One and the Many locked in an enduring embrace. They have swayed between the two poles, either seeing all in terms of the unique One, or seeing the One in terms of the All. The Atomists found nothing but multiplicity, the lowest possible unit, undistinguished, containing nothing but its one homogeneous self; for Zeno and Parmenides, all that they could see or know was contained in the unique being of which they were themselves only expressions. Even Plato became so enamoured of unity that the variety of the world around him appeared only as fleeting shadows, never to be possessed as real treasure. Who can balance between these attractive depths?